


Working 9 to 5 (for service and devotion)

by sdwolfpup



Series: Executive Brienne verse [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Office, Anal Fingering, Angst and Porn, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blindfolds, Edging, F/M, Face-Sitting, Light Bondage, Mouth-Fucking, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Pegging, Phone Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Semi-Public Sex, Written for, brienne is discovering her dom side, but no one is nonconsensually forced into anything at the threat of losing any jobs, but this time brienne is older, even though he's still a little shit, even though it is mostly not face-sitting it's mostly slight power negotiation, face-sitting february, horny people catching unexpected feelings for each other, if you're very sensitive to that, jaime is enjoying his submissive side, just people being horny for each other, there might be some power imbalance here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:46:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22579579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sdwolfpup/pseuds/sdwolfpup
Summary: It's Brienne Tarth's first day as an executive for Lion Corp. She's got a new office with a door that closes, and a new assistant with a mouth that never does. Her first task is mentoring the much-younger Jaime Lannister in the manner he responds to best.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Series: Executive Brienne verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722469
Comments: 1016
Kudos: 736





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Ok just imagine that gif of Dumbledore standing in the hall holding his hands out to the side and then letting them fall with his "welp" face and that is me right now. I blame the JB crew on tumblr for this. Idk what I'm doing, no one is probably in character, I have thought about zero percent of any backstory beyond what you see on the page. Shut off your brain and enjoy. Also I've successfully earwormed myself with the title so godspeed that doesn't happen to you, too. Dolly is catchy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was written for (and thus contains) Face-Sitting February.

Brienne rubs her hands over the tight bun in her hair, settles her suit jacket as comfortably as she can about her broad shoulders, and takes a deep breath, trying to present an image of intense confidence and competence. It's her first day in this role and she needs to get to her office to meet her new executive assistant so they can start getting to work, and she wants to start off on the right foot; rumor has it she's been assigned one of the many Lannisters that Tywin always makes go through the ranks before they can become management and upper level chiefs themselves, and she refuses to let whoever it is think she'll be cowed because her last name is Tarth instead. The fact that she's risen this far in Lion Corp is something of a minor miracle already; she's in her mid-thirties and generally bad at networking, but even the notoriously nepotistic Tywin Lannister can't ignore the fact that she's damn good at her job, so when the Starks came calling Brienne had taken an uncharacteristically bold step and used it as leverage to earn her promotion. 

She feels, mostly, like she's earned it, until she enters her new office and she wonders if this is all some cruel joke. It's not a corner office but it's next door to one, there's a huge window that looks out on Aegon's Hill in the distance, a beautiful mahogany desk with her new nameplate and office supplies, the painting of Tarth her father had sent as congratulations that the facilities team had hung up for her, and Jaime Lannister, golden haired and grinning, in her very comfortable chair. He started from whatever was below the mail room and has been slowly working his way up, leaving problems and swooning women – and men – in his wake. He's the employee nobody wants because he's Tywin's son and he knows it and what that means for his future. Only in his twenties and he already walks around like he owns the company. Which he will, someday, but he doesn't yet.

“What are you doing here?” she asks him, and he props his feet up on her desk like they belong there. 

“I'm your new assistant,” he drawls and she wonders for a fleeting moment if Tywin got it wrong, if Jaime were intended to be promoted to senior management and she is supposed to be his assistant, but she steels herself, her hands clenching each other tightly behind her back. 

“Then why are you sitting at my desk?”

“I was tired. Late night,” he smirks and she can picture that same look in the bedroom and she commands herself not to blush. It doesn't work, but she thinks she keeps it minimal. She's seen him around the office before, of course, but this is the most words they have ever exchanged. They might have briefly wished each other happy Sevenmas at an office party once, but she wasn't even sure he'd been talking to her when he said it. 

She stands, towering over him, and he looks up the height of her in her business suit, slowly, taking all of her in, and he nods. “I heard you were gigantic.”

“I'm also your boss and that's my desk. Get out of my chair.” 

He lifts an eyebrow, not a shred of concern in any part of his very well-muscled body. “Domineering,” he says, “I like it.” But he gets up and bows low, flourishing his hands towards the chair. “It's all yours, boss.” 

She sits down and the chair is warm and it smells like him, and he smells good which she finds incredibly annoying. He starts to sit again in the chair across from her and she gives him a single, pointed look. “This won't take long, you can stand.” 

Jaime seems amused by her pronouncement but he does as he's told. “So what kind of EA do you want? Regular style chores lackey – dry-cleaning, coffee, flowers to broken-hearted mistresses – or do you need me to actually write your reports for you?”

“ _What?_ ” she gapes at him. 

“This isn't my first time being an EA, I've found it helps if we cut the crap. Management offices get doors so we don't have to hide the bullshit. Those doors are thick, no one can hear us, let's just lay it out and get it over with.” 

“I don't-” Brienne understands she's learning something here about her fellow senior managers that she is really not comfortable knowing, but she can't focus on that right now, she has to be professional. “I need someone to assist me: make sure I keep on schedule, answer my calls, help get meetings scheduled and presentations done on time. All those things that are so important but I won't have time for.” 

“Really.” Jaime narrows his eyes at her. “They weren't fucking with me,” he murmurs, and she thinks she doesn't want to know what that means. “Listen, I'll do whatever you want, I'm yours to command.” He gives her that smirk again and she already wants to shove him just for looking like that. Shove him back into her chair, mostly. She's been too long without a date, too busy working her way up the corporate ladder. She'll need to fix that if he's going to stick around looking like this. 

“Then I want you to start organizing my calendar,” she says instead. “I think I've got a trip out of town in a month, too, I need you to schedule that.” 

“Any preferences on hotels? Flights? I imagine legs like those you'll want to travel first class.” 

“That seems wasteful,” she says, though she longs to travel first class. She tries to be a good steward of Lion Corp money and has only ever splurged for priority seating so she can at least get the exit row. 

Jaime laughs and it fills her office in a pleasant wave. “You're senior management now, boss. First class all the way. I'll hook you up.” He winks at her and then turns to go and she allows herself to stare at his ass on his way out the door.

* * *

Jaime pops his head in at the end of the day and she startles, neck-deep in numbers and negotiations, not expecting to see his absurdly handsome face there. Right, she remembers all of a sudden. The heir to the Lannister fortune is her EA. 

“I'm going,” he tells her. “You need anything?”

Brienne rolls her head in a circle, digging her fingers into the back of her neck. “Know any good masseuses?” she asks, only half-kidding. She did get a raise so she can afford a massage or two now and the tension of being _on_ all day on her first day has made every muscle in her body sore. 

“I do,” he says and he comes in and closes the door behind him and she realizes suddenly how late and dark it is. She turned the overhead lights off an hour ago when her head started pounding, relying on the hallway light and the warm yellow glow from the floor lamp by her desk. The lighting is very kind to his youthful skin as he comes around the side of her desk to stand behind her chair. 

“What are you doing?” she asks and she is not as commanding as she was this morning. 

“Giving you a massage,” he says, settling his fingers on her shoulders. She goes even more tense when he does. “Although I don't think I've ever massaged solid rock before, gods are you a bodybuilder under that suit?” 

Brienne grabs the edge of her desk and considers the feasibility of rolling her chair back over his feet and making a run for it. “I like to work out,” she says. “All good leaders benefit from having healthy bodies” 

Jaime starts with his knuckles, pressing them into the tightest knots in her shoulders and she whimpers a little. “Too much?” 

“Yes, but it's a good pain.” 

“My favorite kind,” he murmurs, and his body is very close and very warm behind her and he is the handsome heir to a fortune and her assistant and at least ten years her junior and she stands abruptly, the chair banging into his knees. 

“You don't have to do this, you're my assistant not my health coach.” Brienne grabs her satchel and shoves her laptop into it, blindly grabs some papers and shoves those in as well. “I'll be in early tomorrow, I expect you here no later than eight am.” 

“All right,” Jaime says slowly, rubbing his knee. “I'll be here.” 

She hates that she's looking forward to it.

* * *

Brienne gets in before seven and she's staring unseeing out at the parking lot pondering over a politically tricky email when she sees Jaime get out of a bright red sports car at seven-thirty. It's a sunny day and he looks like he's part of a magazine shoot as he tucks a newspaper under his arm, juggles two coffees, and shuts the door of his car with his foot. He glances up to her window and when he sees her watching him he grins. 

She has thankfully recovered from her blush by the time he actually makes it to her office, setting one of the coffees down on her desk. 

“I took a guess,” he says. “Black, no sugar because you don't like what sugar does to your very healthy body, but some milk because you're not as bitter and uptight as you want people to think.” 

She takes a sip and it's surprisingly close to how she does prefer her coffee, which she finds even more insolent than his sitting in her chair, as though he can read her so well having spent less than a day with her. Brienne sets it down and shoves it away. “No thanks,” she says. She needs to put a stop early to whatever he thinks he's doing here. She is his boss, no matter what his last name and his genetics say, and she can't let him continue to make these sorts of assumptions about her unchecked: that she finds him somehow amusing, that he knows how she likes her coffee, that she's okay with his hands on her. 

Jaime takes the coffee back and shrugs nonchalantly but he seems a little chastised and she likes that look on him better than the pure smug confidence only because it makes her feel more like she's in control of herself. She's on the other side of thirty-five, she can contain herself around even the most beautiful men, even though she has always had a particular attraction to them; if she were a character of myth it would be her weak point, her downfall, the one tender spot from which to bring down the giant warrior woman Brienne Tarth. 

“You have a nine o'clock with Kevan,” he says, standing. “You want advice for dealing with my uncle?”

She knows he threw that familial connection in on purpose so she says, “No,” and stares resolutely at her monitor, dismissing him with her lack of attention. 

“You should,” he says, but he leaves anyway and she thinks he's probably right but she doesn't call him back in and when her nine o'clock goes badly and she is frowning as she walks back to her office, passing Jaime at his desk right outside, the smug look is back in force.

* * *

Brienne doesn't intend to make wiping that look off of his face her mission, but it certainly becomes one. Over the next four weeks he seems to invite her attempts: throwing in his advice without her asking; barging into her office on his whim, not hers; informing her the Friday before her trip that he's made her a reservation for a masseuse in her hotel room once she arrives after her flight. 

“You have to cancel it, I won't have a massage on company money,” she protests. 

Jaime just smirks at her. “The company's not paying for it.” 

“You can't spend my money without asking me!”

“You're not paying for it either. You spend half of our end-of-day meetings rubbing your own neck and you don't want me to touch you. Get the fucking massage.” 

She jerks her head back. “Watch your mouth,” she says, “that's not appropriate language for the office.” 

Jaime lifts his chin and she knows he wants to say “make me,” she can _see_ the words in his eyes and she considers, briefly, that she'd be very glad to make him, but there's a knock on her door and one of the many other Lannisters that works here enters with more aggravating updates from Kevan for her presentation. Jancel? Lancelot? She doesn't remember; there's so many of them and they all have esoteric names. By the time they're done Jaime has left for the day and she is mostly grateful for that. Mostly.

* * *

The week away from him is good for her self-control and her sanity and – except for the massage that she spends most of thinking about him, even though it's a woman who he's hired for her – he does not occupy her thoughts the same way seeing him every day at the office does. Which is why when she's back in the office the following week, early in the morning, before seven even, and he comes in a few minutes later, it's like seeing him the first time again, his aggressively handsome face, his far too warm smile. 

“Welcome back,” he says cheerfully, like they're friends. “How was the trip?”

“Productive.” 

He sits in the chair and waits for her to say more. She does not. “How was the masseuse?” he asks breaking into her bullheaded determination to hold onto her own libido. 

“Good.” 

Jaime's cheerful smile tightens into something less friendly but just as alluring and he gets up and shuts the door. “Do you hate me because I'm Tywin's son or did I do something personally to you? Got your coffee so wrong you were offended?” 

“I don't hate you,” she says, which she thinks is true but some days she thinks she might; it's hard to tell sometimes where her anger comes from, whether he's earned it with his actions or just his attitude. 

“You don't like me.”

“You're a terrible assistant,” she lets slip and now _he_ looks offended. 

“That's a lie. I do every thing you tell me to.”

“Not everything,” she mutters. 

“What haven't I done? I arranged your trip, I screen your calls, you're more on time and better prepared than any other manager in this place.” 

“You don't shut up,” she says and ironically that does shut him up. Temporarily. 

“I don't talk that much.” 

“It's not how much you talk, it's the way you talk to me. Like you're the boss.” 

He walks closer to her desk again, folds his arms over his chest. He's wearing a simple white dress shirt, no tie, unbuttoned at the throat. She wants to devour him. “Someday I will be.” 

“Not yet,” she says, looking up at him from her chair safe behind the desk. “Right now _I'm_ the boss. I'm _your_ boss.” 

“You are,” he agrees, deep, and there is something suddenly crackling in the air that Brienne feels every hair on her body shiver with it. “So why don't you tell me what to do?”

“I do,” she says, but he shakes his head a little. 

“Not what you really want me to do. I told you: I'm yours to command.”

Brienne stands slowly to her full height and it is impossible to miss how he inhales at the speed of her movement. “Sit down,” she says and he does. Not quickly, not like he's jumping at her whim, but like he knows he could say no and he's choosing not to and it irritates her that he still feels like she isn't owning this. It's not even seven am and she's in her office and if they get caught she will be fired for sure, but Jaime is sitting, his legs sprawled open a little and inviting, and she thinks maybe getting caught will be worth it if he'll just keep his damned mouth shut. Or...not. 

“Wait, lie on the floor instead,” she says and he raises one eyebrow languidly and she can see he's getting ready to make some remark but if this going to work he needs to listen so she says, “ _now_ ” in a tone she once learned in a military leadership class and he swallows hard. 

“Sure, boss,” he says but it's at least as desperate as it is arrogant so she lets it slide. 

_This is insane_ , she thinks when he lays down on the floor on his back, his hands folded comfortably on his stomach, his knees pulled up to form a triangle. He looks like he's star-watching in a meadow somewhere. This would be the moment to stop, to laugh and say she's just joking, that they're still teetering on the edge of this all going too far but it could still end here and no one would be wiser. She does not do any of those things. Instead, she slips her hands under her skirt while he watches her with interest, and she pulls her underwear down and off. 

Brienne doesn't usually wear skirts, had decided to wear one today for reasons she could not have articulated to herself earlier, but she wonders if she was subconsciously hoping this or something like this would happen. It could have ended just as easily with her lying back on her desk and Jaime hovering over her, but she likes this better. 

“Very sensible panties,” he says from the floor and she wants to smother him with them for a moment but she's got better plans for his mouth and so she glares at him instead and stands over top of him and she can see now that he is far more on edge than she'd thought. His pupils are wide and his chest is rising and falling much harder than a man calmly lying on the floor would ever breathe, and in his dark slacks she notices a growing bulge. When she stands over him his hands come around her ankles and his fingers dip along the top of her bare feet in her low heels. “What's your plan, boss?” he rasps and she can feel the heat rising from him up between her legs. 

“To make you be quiet,” she says and she kneels down over him now and his hands flow up her legs as she does, strong fingers hot on her calves, the backs of her knees, coming to rest on the backs of her thighs just under her ass. He is trembling more than she is, though. 

“I don't shut up easily.” 

“Good,” she says and she lifts her skirt up to her hips and he exhales so sharply she feels his breath all over the front of her, blowing through the curled hairs at her center, over her bare skin near his face. She watches him, waiting for disgust or fear or some sign that she's going too far, that she's read him all wrong and she's abusing what little power she actually does have over him, but Jaime looks like he's starving and her cunt is all his favorite foods at once. 

Brienne shifts forward on her knees a little and she feels his chin hit her first and she gasps as his mouth starts to move. “Wait,” she manages, and he stops but his fingers tighten noticeably on her thighs. 

“What?” he growls into her wet core. 

“She can barely breathe right now but she manages to put some sort of control into her voice as she says, “You'll start when I tell you.” 

Jaime groans against the skin of her leg but he does as he's told and when he just positions his head, waiting for her, she decides to test his ability to listen a little more. Brienne moves enough to rub herself gently against his mouth and she feels the tortured noise he makes deep in his chest reverberate through her whole body. He's like iron under her, and she is, too, on top of him, two carefully welded pieces of metal pressing against each other without moving. Brienne lets herself meet his eyes for a moment and that's almost a mistake because they are twin flames so hot she nearly burns herself to ash in them, but she pulls back a little and she thinks for a moment at the way he holds her legs that he'll just stop listening and yank her back and she's not sure if she'd let him or not. 

“It's almost seven am,” she says, “and I have a meeting at seven-thirty.”

“You'll be done before seven,” he promises; she feels the movement of his jaw with her thighs. His breathing is erratic and heavy against her. 

“I'm not that close,” she lies. 

“I'm that good,” he boasts and oh there's the smug twist of his mouth that she has spent days agonizing over. 

This is what she wanted to see, she realizes, and she positions herself over him again and says, “Then prove it to me.” 

Before she even reaches the end of the sentence he's already got her clit sucked between his lips and she gasps loudly at the sudden, molten heat of his mouth pressed fully against her. Brienne settles onto her calves, her knees on either side of his head, his golden, curled hair brushing her skin, and he adjusts his grip up to her hips and moans into her and she's already halfway there. He puts his tongue to use, sliding along her wet cunt and dipping inside her until she whimpers too loud for the office but not loud enough for how electrified she is. She should be in control of this but she lets him lead with his tongue and his teeth and his astonishingly soft lips against her, drinking her in even as she envelops him. If he couldn't breathe she's fairly certain he'd push her off but his hips are moving in a constant thrust behind her even as he focuses entirely on what's right in front of him and she's not a hundred percent certain either of them would stop now. He tilts his head to brush his nose against her clit while he fucks her with his tongue and Brienne feels the heat clenching and pulsing deep where there's an ache that runs through her and she says, “Yes, like that” and he speeds up, he sucks harder, he pushes deeper and she's so close, she wants to draw it out longer but she can't form words to tell him to slow, to pull back, and when she looks down at him, his face buried between her thighs his eyes are closed and she says, “Jaime,” and he looks at her and in his eyes he's surrendering and claiming victory all at once and she cries out sharply and throws her head back and pushes against his face as he draws out wave after wave of pleasure. 

When she's empty and limp he keeps at it and she falls back on his chest to break free, his tongue slurping lewdly along her as she moves away. The whole bottom half of his face is shining and he's not smirking anymore. He's panting and open-mouthed and urgent and she can feel him hard at her back, his fingers hard on her hips. She moves her arm back and presses her hand against his cock and he groans and shudders and she rubs him three times, just three and then he's crying out softly and trying to bow under her weight but she holds him down until he goes loose between her legs. Her palm is wet and so are his pants and her thighs and his jaw. They're a mess and they're looking at each other. He doesn't look as smug and self-satisfied as she expected, and she doesn't feel as awkward. 

Brienne stands up and tugs her skirt back down and he just stares up at her, eyes dark, hair tousled. She holds out a hand and helps him to his feet and once he's standing he holds onto her hand and just stares at her. 

“It's not even seven yet, is it?” he finally says and she thinks it will take so much more to shut him up. 

“Let go of me,” she says, tugging her hand free. “I'm going to go take a shower.” Brienne looks meaningfully down at his pants and then back up at him and he doesn't seem to care how he looks. She imagines when your face looks like that you can look however you want and people will think it's sexy. He certainly looks sexy all rumpled and flushed. 

As she's leaving for the company locker room he says, “I told you I was good at this. And I know I was right about the coffee.” 

She hesitates, thinking he still sounds far too certain of himself and his reading of her. “I'm not ready to fire you yet,” she allows, even though they both know the worst that will happen is Tywin will shuffle him off to someone new, and she shuts the door and thinks about what she'll have him do tomorrow.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What do you want?” he asks, his voice already hoarse with desire. It helps that he's as affected by this as she is. She's had men half-heartedly rutting against her before and no matter how needy she'd been to get there, it was never worth it in the end. 
> 
> “I want you to listen to me,” she says. “I want you to...” she stumbles for the first time; putting what she wants into words has always been the hardest part. She wishes people could just _know_ , but they never do, and though it has taken her all of her life to learn how, it's still too much sometimes not just to want things, but to admit it out loud. Brienne puts her hands on Jaime's knees and he shudders a little, so small she wouldn't even have known if she wasn't touching him, but she is and she feels it go through him. It gives her strength. His skin is burning under the pads of her fingers. “I'm going to use my mouth on you,” she says firmly and he groans so deep in his chest it's like the earth settling around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> JB Monthly Madness strikes this 'verse again, this time in the form of mouth-fucking. Thanks to sameboots for convincing me I could make this work and to justplainsalty for both a key element TO making it work and giving it a quick read-through when it was done and adding the term "peri-dick-Brienne" into my lexicon. 
> 
> (Side note: Brienne thinks about a couple of previous unpleasant sexual moments with unnamed men in this story, but none of them were nonconsensual, they were just bad. But in case you need a warning for it, I wanted to leave it up front!)

Brienne avoids Jaime the whole rest of the day. She leaves unusually early that afternoon, mumbling something about an appointment that they both know doesn't exist before she makes it safely home. Home where there are no reminders of Jaime and his smug face and his wickedly skillful tongue. She does not think about how the flame of the meditation candle she lights reminds her of his eyes and she _definitely_ does not think about how it had felt with him breathing on the hair of her cunt when she takes a much-needed bath later. 

Against her will she does think of him as she chokes back her cry when she orgasms in the tub, her fingers slippery on herself. 

The next morning she comes in early and he is already there at his desk, leaning back in his chair, his arms tucked behind his head. There are two coffees in front of him. 

“Good morning, boss,” he says and she sails by with a muttered response, not taking the coffee clearly meant for her. 

He follows her in anyway and sets it on her desk and she just stares at it instead of him as she says, “About yesterday...” 

Jaime doesn't jump in to excuse her behavior or reassure her it was all right. _Now_ he's quiet. Typical. 

“That was inappropriate of me and I hope it didn't make you uncomfortable,” she says, flicking a glance up towards his chest and then with all the willpower she can muster, to his face. 

He frowns at her. “It didn't,” he says. 

“It won't happen again,” she assures him. 

He frowns more deeply. “If you insist.” 

“I do,” she says firmly. “That's all.”

Jaime leaves without another word. She looks at the coffee and takes a drink. 

He's gotten it exactly right this time.

* * *

Jaime is unbearable the entire week. 

It starts at lunch, when he comes in and drops the prepared salad box she asked him to bring on her desk and says, “Your meal, my Queen.” 

“Thank you,” she mutters, because she won't let him annoy her out of being polite to a subordinate. 

“You don't sound thankful.” 

“I am. I'm just busy.” 

He bows low, his hair falling loose over his collar, and straightens again. “I'm just outside if you need me,” he says, putting all the innuendo he can pile on to the word _need_. Brienne does not need Jaime Lannister for anything except to take her calls and arrange her schedule, so she waves him off and doesn't talk to him the rest of the day. 

Brienne spends the next two days locked in her office. She's truly working, but she's also putting as much space between them as she can. He hasn't reported her to HR or his father yet, and he doesn't seem likely to at this point, but she doesn't want to put her career success on Jaime's muscular shoulders and ability to keep quiet. 

It's not a one hundred percent successful strategy. He _is_ her assistant and even in a month she's come to rely on his unexpected competence to make her day run more smoothly. Every time they're in the same room together she ensures the doors stay open. She wishes she could close the door of her body's memory of his mouth just as easily, but he uses his mouth to talk and he talks a lot and there is so often the flash of pink from his tongue. She knows he does it on purpose. It's infuriating. 

He is coiled and insubordinate each time they interact. Never enough to interfere with her work, just her equilibrium. She doesn't know how the other execs don't see whatever-this-is going on between them – she can barely breathe from it sometimes – but they're busy themselves and she suspects none of them could even imagine she and Jaime smiling at each other, let alone what they had done in her office just days ago. Jaime scrupulously never touches her, not once, though his body lingers near enough she can feel his heat. She doesn't touch him either. Once after a meeting when she is about to press her hand into his arm to hold him back to ask about something Kevan had said, she stops herself a millimeter away and she sees he's gone entirely tense. She pulls her hand back and there is the tiniest shift of his body towards her, like he's eager for her touch, before he gets himself back under control and hurries from the room. She lets him go; she can't remember what she was going to ask him anyway. 

Friday morning he's not in when she is, which throws her off her game a little. There's no message from him, either, and she waits until eight am before she peeks out the door to see if he's arrived or if he's finally realized he can have whatever job he wants in the company. But he's walking up to his desk with two coffees and when he sees her she ducks back in and returns to her chair. 

As she expects, he comes in a minute later with her coffee and sets it down. She hasn't told him it was right, but he's been bringing it in every day made the same way, and although after she drinks it she throws the cup away somewhere he can't see, he must know. 

“There's your coffee,” he says tightly and she nods and focuses on the blank email on her screen. “ _You're welcome_ ,” he continues. 

“Thank you. Though I've never once asked you to get me any so I don't know why you keep doing it.” 

“Do you want me to stop?” His voice is far too low for a question about coffee. She can easily imagine they are in bed, and he's got her near the edge and he's asking her that, knowing she would never say yes, that she would beg to make him keep going. 

Brienne squares her shoulders and looks him right in the eye. “Yes,” she says, because if there is one thing Brienne Tarth is good at, it's denying herself pleasure for a greater cause. 

Jaime is truly startled by her answer and, unexpectedly, she sees he is aroused by it, too. It's clear in the way his mouth opens slightly, the way his pupils go wide and dark, the lovely lines of his hands so taut she can see the veins running down them. 

“Well I won't,” he says, his jaw clenched so tight she wonders if he has a headache. He turns and leaves her office and shuts her door – hard, not quite a slam but close – after him. 

There's not much she can do. It's not like HR would do anything but laugh at “brings me coffee when I don't want him to” as a complaint, and he seems equally as unwilling to tell HR “she made me eat her out in the office and I liked it.” All she _can_ do is show him she’s the boss in the only way he seems to understand. The way he seems to want when he licks his lips at her from across the table in a meeting. He never sits behind her like the other EAs do with their execs. He always sits in a chair behind the person across from her, so she has to see him, to feel him watching her. It's that which makes her send him an ill-advised email that afternoon, even though he's right outside her door. 

_I need you to work late tonight. Big presentation for Monday._

There is no presentation and he knows it. His email simply says: _OK, boss._

* * *

Brienne gets very little work done the rest of the day. It's Friday and she knows that's not unusual for the office in general, but she still feels guilty about it. They pay her a lot of money to get work done, not to sit in her chair and think about what she's going to make her assistant do to her with his body. 

_This has to stop_ , she tells herself a hundred times, but she stares at his response and doesn't change her mind. 

She thinks it one last time that evening in the bathroom, trying not to look at herself in the terrible lighting as she loosens her hair from its tight bun. It's past six pm and everyone left a while ago, even the janitors. It's just her and Jaime in the office now as far as she can tell. He was sitting at his desk ramrod straight when she walked by earlier, like he was waiting for her to call him to her, or send him away. She ignored him instead and now she's patting her face with a wet paper towel and half-hoping he's gone when she gets back. It would be better if one of them were even the tiniest smart about this. 

Brienne lifts her chin, pulls back her shoulders, and does her best power walk back to her office through the silent halls. Jaime is still at his desk when she arrives and she slows for just a moment as she says, “come with me.” He stands, so quickly his chair careens into the wall behind him, and they go into her office and he shuts the door. Gently, this time. 

She doesn't turn to look at him as she goes to her window and pulls the blinds down, but she hears him stop in the middle of the room to wait for her. It's dark outside and she's got only the tall lamp by her desk on again and her office looks almost cozy, except for the dangerous pillar of a man standing in the center of it. 

Brienne turns to look him over, leaning back against the edge of the windowsill and crossing her arms over her chest. It's a dominant pose she learned in one of the many leadership classes she's taken. It says that she's relaxed enough in her authority that she doesn't have to stand like she has a big dick, but also that she's not open to debate. 

Jaime looks, well, fuckable, she admits. He's just standing there, legs slightly wide, hands on his narrow hips, sharp jaw thrust forward. His body is a challenge: bright eyes and hard muscles and an aura of invincibility in his own appeal. 

Brienne has been with enough men to know that in their early twenties they think they're at the heights of their sexual prowess because they're still as horny as teenagers but now they have some self-control. When she was in her twenties and fucking men her age, she thought so, too. Now that she's older and discovering older men don't care what she looks like as much as she knows what she's doing, she knows that younger men have stamina and enthusiasm but tend to not be good listeners. 

A man that looks like Jaime is probably worse than most, since most people would let him do whatever he wants just to keep him in their bed. 

But Brienne is not most people, and this is not a bedroom. 

She's his boss and he brings her coffee every day even though she has never once asked, has flat-out said he'll keep doing it even though she's asked him to stop. Jaime needs to work on his listening skills and she is more than happy to teach him. She thinks she might have to keep teaching him until he does report her to HR or he gets another promotion, so she might as well use whatever time they have to focus on some of the things _she_ likes. He is her assistant. 

“Take off your clothes,” she says and he smiles slowly, in a way that she hates because it makes her instantly wet. It's possible she's been wet since she sent the email, though, and she's only just now noticing it because her thighs are pressing together. 

“Sure, boss,” he says, and he holds her stare as he slowly unbuttons his shirt, pulls it off one shoulder and then the other, and lets it fall to the ground; pulls the undershirt over his head in one smooth motion. He's young and vain and doesn't look embarrassed at all. His stomach muscles are, frankly, mouth-watering, as is the trail of golden hair disappearing into the top of his slacks. They're tented already, and Brienne realizes she hasn't actually seen him naked yet, though she's imagined what he looks like. When he slips his pants and underwear down to his feet she is not disappointed. 

Jaime is bursting with vigor and strength and an impressive but not enormous dick and she nods in appreciation of everything he is as he stands there in her office in his socks and shoes and somehow doesn't look ridiculous. 

“Take those off, too,” she says, nodding at his feet, “and then sit down.” He does as she bids and she goes around to her own chair, sitting properly while he sprawls in the chair across from her, his hands on his thighs, framing his erection. “We're going to have a meeting,” she says and delights at the confusion on his face. 

“Now?”

“Yes. I told you earlier to stop bringing me coffee and you refused.” 

“Is that what this is about?” he asks, and there is something in his voice that is not teasing or light. 

“You're not a good listener, Jaime. Consider this an early look at your first performance review.”

He relaxes a little at that; he thinks he understands where she's going. “Well,” he says, gesturing up and down his naked body. “Review me.” 

“I told you: you're bad at listening. You're failing already.” 

“What are you going to do about it?” he asks. 

She lifts her brows and looks right at his cock curling up and out of the thatch of curly golden hair. It bobs under her gaze. “That depends,” she says, and when she looks back at his face there's a slight flush to his cheeks that makes him even more impossibly handsome. “Are you willing to learn?”

It's an out, a way for him to stop this if he doesn't really want it, but he swallows hard and says, far too softly for comfort, “Yes.” 

Brienne undoes the buttons of her suit jacket and takes it off as she stands, hangs it neatly over the back of her chair. Jaime watches her every movement. She comes around the table and he shifts the chair so he's facing her and she takes him in for a moment: he's long and golden and glorious, full of abundant confidence, so eager for whatever she's about to do it's almost too much. _I should stop this_ , she thinks, but she doesn't want to. All of her strength is useless in the face of this one weakness. 

She licks her lips and he leans forward, reaching out his hand towards her. “No,” she says, watches his fingers still, clench, fall back to his leg. Brienne leaves on her lavender silk blouse and her dark pants and she kneels in-between Jaime's legs and his sharp intake of breath is worth it. They still have not touched at all since Monday. 

“What do you want?” he asks, his voice already hoarse with desire. It helps that he's as affected by this as she is. She's had men half-heartedly rutting against her before and no matter how needy she'd been to get there, it was never worth it in the end. 

“I want you to listen to me,” she says. “I want you to...” she stumbles for the first time; putting what she wants into words has always been the hardest part. She wishes people could just _know_ , but they never do, and though it has taken her all of her life to learn how, it's still too much sometimes not just to want things, but to admit it out loud. Brienne puts her hands on Jaime's knees and he shudders a little, so small she wouldn't even have known if she wasn't touching him, but she is and she feels it go through him. It gives her strength. His skin is burning under the pads of her fingers. “I'm going to use my mouth on you,” she says firmly and he groans so deep in his chest it's like the earth settling around them. “I want you to- to direct it, but to not go too deep or too hard.” 

“How will I know?” he asks and he seems genuinely concerned. 

“Stand up and I'll show you.” She settles back on her heels as he does, pushing the chair back so that he's not entirely in her face, though she sees he's the perfect height once he's towering above her, his cock at her nose. It will be easy to rise up and take him in her mouth. She doesn't usually give men oral, even though she's enjoyed it when she has, because she doesn't trust most men. Most men think having her on her knees before them means they're in control and in her experience men believing they're in control of a woman her size means they stop caring as much about what she likes. But she's learned they start paying much better attention when she has their balls in her hand, and she cups Jaime's now, rolls the fragile weight in her fingers while his body tenses before her. “You'll know,” she says, squeezing a little, not too much to hurt, but enough to get the point across. 

“Can I touch you?” he asks, low and throaty. 

“Only my head.” 

She tilts back to look up at him and he touches his fingers to her cheek, rubs them over her lips, messing up her lipstick. It's alright; she's about to mess it up quite a lot more. 

“Any other questions?” she asks. 

“Can I come in your mouth?” he asks and she trembles now, her cunt clenching. 

“No. When you're close, pull away and don't let it touch me.” She's firm on that; she let one man ejaculate on her face once and that was enough, and swallowing Jaime down feels too personal, even though she's about to have his dick in her mouth. 

“Can I talk while we're doing this?” His fingers keep running over her features, like he's memorizing her face with his touch. 

“No,” she says quickly. She's tried that, too, and it's always worse than the oral sex had been. Brienne likes the idea of it, but never the way men have done it, because it inevitably strays into dominating the big woman. If she never has to hear, “yeah you like that, don't you?” delivered like a slap one more time it will be too soon. 

Jaime's hand drops to his side. “So I'm just supposed to stand here and silently hold your head and fuck your mouth?” 

Brienne frowns up at him. “That's exactly what you're supposed to do.” 

“Brienne-”

“Don't,” she says sharply. “Don't call me that, not now.” 

He takes a step back and she cannot imagine why that's what makes him lose his nerve, but she just sits on her heels and watches him. Brienne wavers, for a moment, at the frustrated need all over his face, but she doesn't want this to feel personal and if he says her name like that it will make it too hard to stop.

“Okay, _boss_ ,” he says, and then he inhales and steps back towards her, his hands fisting in her hair. “Whenever you're ready.” 

His cock is still hard, not as urgent as before but she grabs it with one hand, his sack with her other and she licks a long stripe up his length and he gasps, his fingers tightening against her scalp. And then, because she's oddly worried he's going to change his mind, she takes him down as deep as she can and he moans loudly above her and his cock swells in her grip. 

_Better_ , she thinks. 

Jaime tastes like every other man she's sucked off: salty and bitter and a sour-sweet tang that rests on her tongue like candy, but he's somehow more of all of it, thick and full in her mouth. She sucks hard, showing him how deep she'll let him go, and the noise he makes is obscene. With her free hand she's massaging his balls, gentle and firm in turns, and his hips are already starting to thrust a little towards her so she loosens the hold on his cock and lets him set the pace. 

“Fuck,” he mutters, and she feels him look down at her as if checking but she lets it go. In return he unclenches his fingers a little and instead holds her head almost tenderly as he starts to slide in slow, short movements in and out of her willing mouth. 

Up close the muscles of his stomach are a painting and now that she's got a hand free she uses it to explore him, feels the ripple of his abs, the tension in his ass and thighs as he holds himself in check, traces the line of hair that leads down past his belly button. He's still thrusting, and it's too slow and too shallow so she leans forward a little to encourage him. 

“Can I--” he presses the pads of his fingers into her skull, the world's sexiest acupressure treatment. “I won't say anything about you,” he murmurs like he knows exactly why she hates dirty talk. “But I'm not...it's too hard to stay silent.” 

She slides back off of him, the head of his cock resting at her lips, and she looks up past his golden chest to find him glaring down at her. Not angry, but desperate. 

“Fine,” she says against the soft skin of his dick. But she squeezes his sack as a reminder and then opens her mouth and holds his gaze as a short, hard tremor goes through him. He thrusts in a little too much and she clenches him briefly and he gasps and pulls back. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles, his hands moving to cup her cheeks, thumbs gentle along either side of her mouth. “Can you open a little wider?” he asks and she does. They're still staring at each other as he goes more slowly this time, sliding his cock in while her tongue works him back towards her throat and he's almost shivering he's holding himself together so tightly. Jaime breaks first as his eyes flutter closed and he tilts his head back as he slowly pulls out and thrusts in again, still slow, but deeper than before. 

Brienne closes her eyes, too, hums around the weight of him in her mouth and hears his responding moan, feels his hands tighten against her skin. 

“Fuck, you're-- this is incredible,” he hastily amends, his voice deep as the sound of a low bell tolling through her. She's wet now, her own hips moving a little in response as he shifts his hands and fucks her mouth. Jaime's moving faster now, just the right speed, just the right depth, and she glides both hands to clench his hips, secretly hoping he'll demand more, but he doesn't, he keeps at it, perfectly in control, listening to what she's told him. The slurping sound of his cock sliding in and out of her lips is so loud she thinks anyone nearby could hear it but it's just them alone in the building and he's got those strong hands wrapped in her hair and his delicious length in her mouth and she's _aching_ but she doesn't want to stop touching him just to touch herself so she presses her legs together and moans around him. 

“Oh gods,” he groans, “I'm getting close,” but she already knows because he's starting to stutter more, one thrust too short, the next a little too much. She takes all of it, thick lips wrapped around her teeth to protect him, her chin wet with her own saliva mixed with what's leaking eagerly from his cock. He's going faster now, his movements getting wilder and she moves with him, directing him with her thumb pressed into the divot under his hipbone, her fingers curving around his hips. She's fucking him with her mouth as much as the reverse, swallowing him down eagerly and he shifts to pull her hair into a ball with one fist, his other hand hovering between them until she bumps his knuckles with her nose. He wants her to let him go, she can tell, but she doesn't want to. 

His hand tightens in her hair, pulling her back and she fights against it for a moment, desperate to taste him salty in her mouth, sliding down her throat, but he pulls, harder, and she pops off and his hand grips himself and Jaime turns, still holding her head with one hand, jerking himself off even though he barely needs it. His cock spurts thick, white semen a few seconds later, and it hits the floor next to her but it doesn't touch her at all. 

He's chanting softly, “fuck, yes, fuck,” as he comes down and she watches the ecstasy make his face twist like he's in pain. 

Her cunt is clenching around nothing and it's driving her mad, so she slides one hand down her pants, under the silk panties she'd bought a day ago and worn like she knew today she would break, and she cries out softly when her fingers rub against her swollen clit. The noise shakes Jaime out of whatever haze he's lost in and he looks down at her touching herself, and when she expects him to give her his smug smile, he frowns. 

“Let me do that,” he insists in a fucked-out voice. 

But she doesn't need him, she's told him that so many times and she wants it to be true, so she gets herself off while he stands there naked, watching her and holding her hair. Her orgasm comes on fast and hard and she wails a little in surprise and presses her forehead against his thigh for support as it rolls through her. Brienne takes a moment to pant through it and he releases her hair, runs his hand gently over her head. 

She pulls her head away from his far too tender touch and her hand out of her pants as she stands. Still in her low heels and him in his bare feet, she's noticeably taller than Jaime now, but he doesn't seem to care as he tilts his head to look at her. His eyes are as soft as his hand was, like he's seeing something she had no intention of sharing. 

“You should put your clothes back on,” she says, forcing herself to turn away. There's a mess on the floor and she goes to the bathroom to get a bunch of paper towels, pausing long enough to wash her face with the rose-smelling liquid soap. The scent is strong enough she can't smell Jaime at all when she's done. 

The door to her office is open when she gets back and Jaime is nowhere to be seen. She huffs, disappointed that he's left her with the mess, but she gets down on the floor and starts cleaning it up and as she's blotting away his semen with a paper towel he comes back in holding stain cleaning supplies he's pilfered from the janitor's closet. The locked janitor's closet. But of course Jaime Lannister has the keys to anywhere he wants in the building his family owns. 

He gets down on his knees next to her and they clean together in silence until the only way someone can tell what happened is that this part of the carpet looks a little cleaner than the rest of her office. She glances up and he smirks and rises easily to his feet. He doesn't offer to help her stand. 

“So how did I do?” he asks when she's standing, too. 

Brienne feels her cheeks grow warm and although she shrugs, her own face betrays her. “I won't fire you yet,” she says, just like last time. 

“You could, you know,” he says, serious. 

“Transferred maybe, not fired.” 

“I think my father would be happy to see me go. Up or out, as he puts it, and I've always chosen sideways.” 

She is not interested in hearing about Jaime's parental issues, or any issues, because she needs him to just be her willing assistant and sexual whatever and not her friend. He's seen too much of her already to let him get close. 

Brienne's lips and jaw are tired from their exertion and she just nods instead of trying to talk. He tucks a stray lock she's missed from her bun back into her hair and then smiles. 

“Have a good weekend, boss,” he says. “Don't work too hard.” 

She watches him through a slit in the blinds as leaves the building. He gets into his flashy car and sits in the dark for a full minute, before the engine roars to life and he finally drives away.


	3. (Interlude)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I just think if we're going to keep doing this--”
> 
> “We are not,” she insists. 
> 
> He tilts his head and even though he's a decade her junior and - ostensibly - works for her, he looks as disappointed at her utter delusion as if she's a student lying to her teacher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since apparently this fic series is becoming a Thing, especially where the monthly madness prompts are concerned, I actually gave some thoughts to the characters and the world they inhabit and it turns out they needed to have a Talk before the next sexual encounter. So have a necessary character discussion with no smut! Thanks to kirazi for a quick read to ensure this was emotionally in-line.

Monday morning she comes into work early and he's already there again. Sometimes she wonders if he sleeps there just so he can beat her in. He's fully dressed but she pictures him naked and it weakens the resolve she's built over the weekend to not think about him outside of a professional context. 

“Good morning,” she says. Professionally. 

“Why won't you let me be nice to you?” he responds and she stops dead in front of his desk. 

“What?”

“You let me do other things to you,” he nearly purrs and she jerks her head towards her office, frantically looking around even though she knows they're the only ones here right now. Jaime smirks and saunters in before her and she takes a steadying breath before she follows, shutting the door. 

“We can't talk about...this out there,” she says urgently. 

Jaime takes his seat in front of her desk and steeples his fingers, peering at her over them when she goes to her own chair. She feels more in control when she's in it, the supple leather at her back, the hard expanse of wood between them like a barrier. 

His face is very serious but his eyes are dancing, mischievous fairy lights. Whatever happened between Friday night and this morning, she's not sure she likes it. Somehow Jaime seems more sure of himself, not less, and she doesn't need him to be _more_ self-satisfied. _I shouldn't have done it a second time_ , she thinks. One time she could have played off as a test of their chemistry, a reckless mistake; two times – after she'd told him she wouldn't do it again – is starting to seem like she wants him. 

“There are an awful lot of unspoken rules here,” he says, glib and playful like they're talking about a sexy game of chess. Maybe they are. Brienne likes to be in at least partial control in the bedroom because it's safer that way and men expect it from her, but it's always been protective. With Jaime it feels...desirable. A contest where they both can win. 

Nothing about this should be anything but a brief flight of fancy. Maybe being an executive has gone to her head. Gods, is she going to start being a nightmare to restaurant workers, too? She can't bear that.

“I don't mind rules,” he continues, and he rests his hands on the edge of her desk and leans towards her. “They give me something to bend.” 

“That's not the point of rules,” she snaps and his mouth curves into a pleased smile. She feels like she walks into every trap he sets, even though she is his boss and should be leading him. 

“I just think if we're going to keep doing this--”

“We are not,” she insists. 

He tilts his head and even though he's a decade her junior and - ostensibly - works for her, he looks as disappointed at her utter delusion as if she's a student lying to her teacher. “Then we should be more explicit about the rules,” he finishes. 

“Where's my coffee?” she asks, reaching for something to distract him. 

“I didn't get you any today. You told me to stop.” 

_Oh_ , she thinks, hiding her disappointment. She certainly can't ask him to get her coffee now; then it will feel like he won this round. “Good,” she says and she sounds like she means it. 

“No coffee, check. What else?”

“You do your job and I do mine.” 

“What is my job?” he asks, low and provocative. 

Brienne folds her hands over each other on top of her desk and meets his wildfire stare. “We've been over this: organize my schedule, plan my trips, keep me on track during the day, and help with research or report work. You're my assistant, I expect you to assist.” 

“But not with orgasms,” he says and she feels her skin turn crimson. 

“Excuse me?”

“Rather, the first time you did, but the second time you didn't, so I'm a little confused, as you can imagine.” 

She swallows down her embarrassment and her lust. “We don't need to discuss this, there won't be a third time.” 

“Brienne,” he sighs and she glares at him. He glares back. “Why don't you want me to call you that? It's your gods-damned name.” 

It feels too personal, too familiar, and familiarity breeds friendship, and she will not be friends with the employee she's fucking around with. Especially not _this_ employee. Brienne has been down that road before – not the employee part, that's new – but Jaime has all the makings of being just like Renly, only worse because this time she knows going in it will never be more than this and if she lets herself believe it will be against all evidence to the contrary, then she'll only have herself to blame later when she's heartbroken. 

But she clearly can't tell him any of that, because that's just a different path to the same destination. 

“You can call me Ms. Tarth,” she says instead. 

He's still got the edge of her desk in his hands. She remembers how they felt fisted in her hair as he-- she jerks her eyes back to his face. That's not much safer ground, but it will do. “All right. 'Ms. Tarth' it is. 'Boss' is still okay, too?” She nods and he leans back in his chair, his hands resting on his (soft, strong, pounding) thighs. “See? We're making good progress. Now, sexually speaking,” the blush that had finally dissipated springs up again, “I've been tested and have nothing to report, I assume the same is true for you?” 

She nods mutely, embarrassed that she hadn't even considered that on Friday. Brienne is usually a fanatic about condoms and being safe and it hadn't even crossed her mind. She's in even more trouble here than she thought. He's too attractive; it's short-circuiting her good intentions. They have to put a stop to this. 

“Good. Are you on some sort of birth control?” he asks and he sounds like a clinician taking her vitals. She has an IUD and she's on the pill, but he doesn't need to know that. 

“Why does it matter?”

“Ms. Tarth,” he says and she thinks 'Brienne' might have been overall more dangerous but it was definitely safer for her libido, “we both know this is going to end in us fucking, we may as well be prepared so we can enjoy it.” 

“That's quite an assumption,” she says and her voice is noticeably higher than it should be. She clears her throat. “Especially since I told you it won't happen again.” 

“That's what you told me after the first time, too. We were in this very office, I'm sure you remember.” 

He's such a smartass and she doesn't know why that makes her want to fuck him more. It says a lot about her, none of it good, she's sure. Regardless, she's certain _that_ part of his personality is not going to change, so her options seem limited. One: she really does put an end to this and he stays her assistant and she ends up spending an obscene amount of money on batteries and time alone in her office. Two: she asks him to be transferred to someone else, but he's a great EA and she hates to have to spend more time building up a working relationship with someone new who may not even be worth it. Or three: she keeps him as her EA and her sexual partner and she takes control of her own desires instead of letting them control her.

That has to be the healthiest option, doesn't it? Jaime Lannister would be the perfect test of everything she's spent the last fifteen years building to protect herself from another Renly. The wolf blowing at her brick house. Or the lion, she thinks, looking at his curling golden hair and cat-green eyes. 

And if it gets too much, she can ask HR for that transfer. He's been transferred before, no one will bat an eye when she shuffles him to his next role. 

He's been quiet, like he knows she's going through the careful mental calculations of what this decision will cost her and he doesn't want to intrude. It's that which seals the deal; if he'd pushed even once more, she knows she would have said no and meant it.

“It will happen again,” she says eventually, and his smile is a little smug, but mostly happy. “On _my_ terms.”

“You're the boss.”

“I don't know all the rules yet, except that if either of us wants to stop - whether one act or this whole thing - we do. Immediately. That's the only thing that's non-negotiable.” 

Jaime nods solemnly. “I agree.”

She checks her watch. It's still early; the office would be quiet as people filter in late, unwillingly leaving the weekend behind. Jaime shifts in the chair and when she looks at him he seems eager, the fingers of his right hand drawing circles on on his knee. 

“Go get me some coffee,” she says. 

“Yes, Ms. Tarth,” he says, standing slowly. “The coffee was to your liking then?” She nods curtly, not wanting to admit too much. “Can I get you anything else?” 

She meets his eyes and there's a desire burning in them that she wants to set free, but it's too soon still and she needs him to know she's serious about being the dictator here. “That will be all,” she dismisses him, opening her laptop. 

“Coffee for now,” he says, and he leans forward to run his fingers along her desk in a caress, “and whatever else you need later.” 

Then he's gone and she feels like an ancient explorer who's just entered the part of the map that says _Here be dragons_. This voyage might just sail off the edge of the world by the time they're done, but she's determined to take advantage of it before she goes.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As she's leaving Thursday night two weeks later, she tells him: “You should wear a tie tomorrow.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I ended up actually plotting this story out which is madness given this section in particular is pretty much straight up porn. BUT. There is an emotional arc! And since it's plotted I'm working on it in-between HFoG instead of waiting for JB Monthly Madness prompts. But pretty much every chapter except Interlude chapters (of which there will be one more) are going to be like 90% PWP and 10% Feelings. 
> 
> This chapter features: edging, blindfolds, and bondage. Pretty mild for all three but in case one (or all) of those things are not to your liking, I'm warning early.

Now that it's out in the open between them that something, who knows what, will happen again, Jaime turns relentless, like he's prodding her into snapping and taking him right there on her desk. 

Brienne's thought about it, she has to admit. Several times. 

But she will not let some arrogant, obnoxious young stud goad her into fucking him, no matter how much he wants it. So the more he pushes her, the closer he stands near her every day – adding an inch at a time until she's fairly sure he's near enough at one point that she can hear his heart pounding – the more she denies him. 

Jaime is an irresistible force, but she's an immovable object and she will win this particular battle, dammit. 

As she's leaving Thursday night two weeks later, she tells him: “You should wear a tie tomorrow.” She's glad she's looking at him when she does because the way the understanding and heat light up his eyes is better than porn. 

“Yes, Ms. Tarth,” he says and she hears those three words in her head all night. She doesn't do anything about the way they carve open a valley of yearning inside her, because she knows what she has planned tomorrow will fill it up. 

When she arrives the next day and sees him at his desk she forgets how to breathe for a moment and almost starts laughing in giddy disbelief. He's wearing a tailored suit with edges so sharp they look like they were shellacked into place. It's a simple suit on the whole – dark gray in color, white shirt underneath, tie so deep red it feels like an attack – but the simplicity of it just highlights the expense. Gold cufflinks glint at the wrists. When he stands his belt has a gold buckle. Brienne tries not to stare too long in that area. 

“Good morning,” he says and holds his hands slightly out to his side like he's presenting himself. 

“Very good,” she manages, both as a response and approval, and he starts to follow her into her office but she shakes her head quickly. “Later,” she murmurs, and shuts the door between them. 

Even though she barely leaves her office all day and Jaime doesn't come in once, she gets very little work done. At lunch she hurries out past him to the small kitchen area on their floor and barges in on two women just as one is saying, “Did you see that suit he's wearing?” and the other one makes an indecent groan. They both go silent when Brienne enters. The one who was talking flushes a little and looks at her almost with envy. Brienne doesn't know their names – they work for a different department and she's never run into them directly before – but they have to be talking about her assistant. 

She pops her microwave meal in to cook and considers whether she should say something, even though it would be the height of hypocrisy to condemn the women for their words when she's done...what she's done. 

_I have to stop this_ , she thinks, even though they've come to an agreement, even though Jaime could say no at any time; could probably even get her fired if he really wanted to. He _wants_ this, she can see it on his smug face. 

So Brienne takes out her meal with the tips of her fingers and gives the women a satisfied smile and leaves them there to be jealous of her, though they have no idea just how jealous they should be. She has to admit she arrives back at her area walking a little taller, can feel Jaime's eyes travel the length of her form and instead of being nervous she meets his stare, lifts an eyebrow, and then disappears back into her office. 

There's a private message for her on the company chat: 

**Jaime Lannister:** Do you need me?

He'd sent it while she walked to her desk. Brienne sets her food down, arranges everything, takes a moment to make sure there are no urgent emails waiting for her, before she types a response. 

**Brienne Tarth:** Not yet. 

She imagines she can feel the frustration and impatience radiating off of him through the walls, but it could just be her own as time ticks unbearably slowly towards five pm. Finally, two minutes til, Brienne opens her door and Jaime's head whips towards her and she's staggered by the flame of want in his eyes. She licks her lips to gain back some of her own control and looks around the office area. It's empty, has likely been empty for the last thirty minutes. The janitors come at six on Fridays, which means they have an hour. It will be enough. 

Jaime stands and she nods, though she suspects he might have come in whether she'd allowed it or not. He's not a man used to being made to wait, and she's pushed him to the edge of his patience. As he walks by her, his fingers brush along the top of her hand and Brienne shivers. It feels like a promise, but it's not his promise to make today. Today she's going to see just how patient Jaime Lannister can be. 

Brienne shuts and locks the door and stands with her back pressed against it, watching him stand there tall and lean and devastatingly handsome in his far too expensive suit. No twenty-something should own a suit like that; he's wearing clothes for a powerful fifty-year old who holds the world in his hands. 

He's nearly vibrating with need, his fingers tapping an impatient pattern on his strong thighs. “What should I do, boss?” 

They've hardly talked today and his voice flows through her, melting every place it touches. 

“Take off your clothes and sit in my chair,” she says. 

“Naked? I thought you wouldn't want my bare ass on that fine leather.” He's so fucking confident she wants to scream. 

“Just do it,” she says tightly. “Hand me your tie first.” 

She watches him tug at the knot, the way the silk slips loose and hangs uneven against his chest for a moment before he slides it free. Brienne swallows and holds out her hand, but he walks towards her, crowding her back against the door with his heat and the sheer force of his presence. Jaime puts the tie around her neck, holding onto the ends, his body only inches away, and she wonders if he's going to pull her into him, if she's going to be able to resist when he does. He doesn't though; he lets the tie go, flicks one of the ends so it brushes against her nipples already peaked and sensitive against her shirt, and goes back to the chair. 

“Should I move it to the middle of the room?” he asks as nonchalantly as if they're talking about redecorating for fun. 

“No, leave it there.” 

He undresses quickly, laying his suit jacket over the back of his chair, his shirt on top of that, his pants folded and placed in the seat and his underwear and socks tucked neatly on top. Brienne drinks in the sight of him, memorizes it for later nights, the way his muscles pull and stretch under his perfect skin. It's not perfect, though, she sees now. He's got a small scar just above his right knee, a small fading bruise near his hip, another scar up by his shoulder. Jaime's body is athletic and well-used and it makes him more attractive, knowing he knows how to move it; that he's taken hits and gotten back up again. Brienne admires resilience more than most things, and for all he could be an easily spoiled man-child, he hasn't been yet, not around her. She thinks he may never be. 

Jaime sits naked in her chair and it's obscene how utterly assured he looks there. He could run the company just like this, she thinks, and no one would say a word. The emperor has no clothes, and nobody gives a shit. 

They stare at each other from across her office, and then Brienne walks to the other empty chair and puts her leg up on it. She's wearing a skirt again today, thigh-high stockings and a garter belt underneath, and she tugs up the skirt so he can see it, the black fabric dark against her pale skin. She's got very little color in her skin in general, but her thighs are basically milk-white. Jaime doesn't seem to mind; she can see his cock already stirring. Brienne unsnaps the garters expertly – she'd practiced it that morning over and over until the movement felt natural – and rolls the stocking down and off her leg while Jaime watches and gets harder by the second. By the time she's got both of them off, he's already leaking a little. 

“What's the plan?” he asks in a voice sandpapered with lust. 

“I'm going to blindfold you with your tie,” she says, walking around the desk. 

“I picked my best one just for this,” he says, smirking. She's standing in front of him, between his spread legs, and he wraps his fingers around his cock and slides his hand lazily up and down. “As you can see, I'm ready.” 

“Not yet,” she breathes. “Put your arms on the armrests.” He does, watching her curiously until she takes one of the stockings, smoothes it flat so it won't hurt – just like the website she studied told her to do – and starts winding it around his arm, tying it to the chair. He inhales sharply and the air suddenly feels as heavy as a thunderstorm. 

“You can tell me to stop,” she tells him quietly. 

“I won't.”

“Not just now,” she says, wrapping his whole forearm thoroughly and tying a loose but firm bow, “but at any time.” 

“I _won't_ ,” he assures her.

“How do you know that?”

“I trust you.” When she pulls back to stare at him, he looks so young and vulnerable for a moment she almost unties him right there. 

“How old are you?” she asks abruptly. 

“Twenty-four. Why, am I too old?” He's smirking again and it's a relief and Brienne tightens the knot a little as he laughs. “Guess not,” he announces. His cock is stiff and she swipes the slit with her thumb. Jaime shudders but he doesn't stop smiling. 

Brienne ties his other arm down too and has him test it. They hold him easily in place, even when she can see him straining a little. He doesn't look panicked or scared, he looks ready. 

“Does that hurt?”

“No.”

She slides the tie off of her neck in the same way he did, and holds it near his face. “The second you say stop, we stop.” 

“Bri--” he presses his lips together and frowns. “I know. I trust you.” Repeating it hasn't made it any easier to hear but she simply nods and leans into him, tying the necktie around his eyes while he presses his nose into her blouse, and with his lips seeks out her nipple through the fabric. 

She arches into the heat of his mouth and moans low. Jaime's not the only one who's been impatient for this. Brienne thinks about him too often. At work, of course, because he's always there, smelling good, being helpful, hovering relentlessly; but also when she's away from work. She got coffee last weekend and thought of him bringing her coffee every morning. At home three nights ago she ran across a stupid meme on social media and her first thought was how Jaime would laugh at it. 

Anything more than this – the wet fire of his tongue ruining her silk blouse, the feel of his cock pressed against her thigh – is dangerous. She pulls away from him and his teeth hold on for a fraction of a second to her nipple through her shirt before he lets her back away from him. There's an appealing flush on his cheeks, disappearing into the red of his necktie blindfold.

“So now what?” he asks from deep in his chest. 

“Now we see how long you can last,” she says. He frowns a little and she kneels between his legs and rubs her hands up his thighs until she's framing his cock with her hands. She brushes her thumbs over his balls, massaging them, and he inhales abruptly. Brienne takes him into her mouth and he groans, loud, like it's painful, but he doesn't say stop. She sucks as much of him in as she can and she uses her tongue and lips and a humming noise in her mouth until she can feel his balls tightening under her thumbs and then she pulls away, his cock thumping against his waist. 

“Fuck,” he whispers, his pelvis thrusting up, looking for more. His cock is deep red and gleaming in the light from her saliva. She hovers near so he can feel her breath but not so near he can touch her. 

His fingers are white-knuckled on the arm rests of the chair. 

Brienne stands and moves away from him and his head turns, following the sound of her as she takes off her jacket, unbuttons her blouse. She didn't wear a bra today on purpose, a risk that no one but she knows about, and it thrills her to leave her blouse open, the buttons brushing her sensitive nipples as Jaime thrusts a few more times in the empty air and takes a few steadying breaths. 

“Okay?” she asks. 

“Yes.” 

Brienne goes back to the chair and nudges his legs together, then straddles them, lowering herself gently onto the middle of his thighs, her skirt brushing his cock and he hisses a little. 

_I'm too heavy_ , she thinks, holding most of her weight herself, flushing red with embarrassment. 

Jaime's legs shift a little and his brow furrows. “Sit down,” he says when she doesn't. 

“No.” Her legs are trembling a little already, and she's using his shoulders to steady herself. His skin is smooth and hot under her palms. 

“I want to feel you,” he says, almost a whine. 

He's going to make her say it, damn him. Brienne sighs. “I'm too heavy.” 

Jaime laughs, a bright, startling noise in the thick quiet of her office. “What kind of weaklings have you been with, boss? I can take it.” 

The other men had not been weaklings. Well, not all of them. But even the ones who were strong enough never seemed to like feeling exactly how big she was when she was on top of them. She knows it's unappealing for a man to feel like the woman he's fucking could carry _him_. Brienne lifts herself up a little more and Jaime makes a frustrated noise that she smothers by pressing her bare breast into his mouth. 

He takes up his earlier exploration of her nipples with enthusiasm, happy enough to be distracted as he sucks and licks and nips at her, exploring the contours and feel of her breast with his lips and nose. He hasn't seen her naked yet and she's worried for a moment the meager size of her chest might be a turn off, but when she reaches down between them to grip his cock it's as thick and solid as ever. When she runs her nails along the length of him he quivers under her and she feels it in his tongue. 

Brienne shifts his face to her other breast while she pulls and slides the skin of his cock up and down, wetting her palm with his own juices. He's thrusting eagerly up into the circle of her hand when she feels the trembling in his legs with her thighs and she shoves herself up and off of him and he groans and curses and bites his lip, but doesn't come although his desperation for it is palpable. 

Jaime's panting now, deep, heaving breaths, and she moves around behind him and leans down to whisper into his ear. 

“Are you okay?”

“No,” he gasps, half-laughing. 

“Should we stop?”

“No.” 

“Good,” she manages, sliding her hands down his chest. He trembles under her touch and she brushes his cock with her knuckles. He turns his head and kisses her cheek – open-mouthed and hungry, but a kiss nonetheless – and Brienne stills and pulls away. 

Jaime's got his head lifted up and turned to the side like he's trying to see over his shoulder. “What?” he asks. 

“Don't do that,” she says.

“No _kissing_?” His voice is high with disbelief. “You've had my cock in your mouth more than once. I should think my lips would be an improvement.” 

She's sure they would be. They're soft and talented and just the right amount of wet and kissing him would be a disaster for her self-control. 

“No kissing,” she insists and this time when he huffs it's anger. “Do you want me to untie you?”

He's quiet, his hands flexing and releasing against the arm rests. “No,” he finally says and she's genuinely surprised. 

Brienne moves back to his front and sits down on the edge of the desk and just looks at him for a moment. Jaime's still mad, she can see it in the tension of his jaw, the bunching muscles of his shoulders. But he's turned on, too, his cock so deep red it's almost purple, and there's a steady, subtle, persistent movement of his hips as he searches for release. She can give him that, at least. 

She pulls her panties off, the center of them wet with her arousal, and she wraps them around his cock for a moment, slides them up and down and he moans and thrusts up as much as he can tied to her chair. 

“I'm going to untie your blindfold,” she says, “but we're not quite done.” She stands and unties it swiftly from arm's length away, though he leans forward trying to mouth her breasts again. When the tie is free she hangs it loosely around her own neck and he blinks into the light before focusing on her chest, a slow smile growing on his face. 

“Thank you,” he says, flicking his gaze up to her eyes. “I was worried you'd buttoned up again.” 

Brienne blushes, knows it flows down to her chest, and his smile turns amused, but not maliciously. He looks almost fondly at her and that warmth makes him more attractive than he's ever been and she has to look away. 

To distract them both she sits back on the desk and spreads her legs in her skirt and he tries to look under but it's too dark, she thinks, because he wrinkles his nose in disappointment and goes back to appreciating her chest. Brienne has never had a man stare at her chest with such desire. It's an intoxicating first, just like tying Jaime up has been, just like this whole experience has been. 

She's not going to stop, either. 

Brienne pulls open the top left drawer of her desk and pulls out a vibrator and Jaime's eyes go wide in surprise and lust and delight all mixed together. She thinks about kissing him then, feeling those emotions with her lips, but she forces herself to look down at the vibrator instead. 

“When I'm done, then you can be done,” she says, glancing over at him. 

“Why don't you let me do it?” He gestures vaguely towards his own cock with his trapped hands. “Pity to let a perfectly good erection go to waste.” 

She smothers a laugh, but he must see the way her eyes crinkle because he grins at her. “This has been more reliable than any dick,” she informs him. 

He doesn't look amused anymore, he looks intent, heated. “I can do better than that.” She doesn't understand how he's not melting the bonds around his arms with the volcanic burn of his desire. 

“Not today,” she says and regrets it immediately because it suggests there may be a later where she does let him fuck her and her cunt clenches eagerly, wanting it. She could do it now. Crawl onto his lap and lower herself onto his impressive hard-on. Ride him fast until they're both sweating and screaming. Brienne grips the edge of the table with her free hand to hold herself in place. 

_I will not fuck Jaime Lannister._ She gets out the lube and rubs it along the vibrator and feels his hungry stare on her fingers as she does. _At least not today_ , she amends. 

She puts her feet up on his knees and although the position reminds her of the intimate embarrassment of every gynecologist appointment she's ever had, the reality of the darkness behind the closed blinds of her office, Jaime naked and hard in her soft leather chair, the taste of him still on her tongue, all diffuse any awkwardness. 

Brienne slides the vibrator in slowly while he watches her and she closes her eyes against the draw of him. She focuses instead on the smooth silicone filling the ache in her center, thrusts it in deep and gasps out loud. 

“Fuck, please,” Jaime begs. “Can I at least see you?” 

She opens her eyes and he's leaning as far forward as he can in the chair, the line of his neck taut and desperate. Brienne pulls the vibrator out and tugs her skirt all the way up her hips and he licks his lips and nods in gratitude. 

After that, she comes more quickly than she could have imagined as she fucks herself with the vibrator while Jaime watches her, the weight of his stare as heavy as his body pressed against her. Brienne isn't quiet as she slides the vibrator in and out, as she circles and rubs her clit, but when she throws her head back and her body arches and sparks and shakes, Jaime's growled, “Yes, fuck, yes,” makes her cunt clench so hard she's too breathless to cry out. 

When the light dims again and she opens her eyes, Jaime's body is coiled and begging for release, and Brienne slides her bare foot up his leg to touch his cock and he comes immediately, half-groan, half-shout of pleasure and agony, and his semen is thick and covers his stomach and her ankle as it pulses repeatedly. 

“Gods,” he gasps, his head and shoulders slumping back in the chair, his hands open and limp at his sides, arms still held by the nylons. “Untie me,” he demands and she moves quickly, pulling scissors out of her desk drawer and cutting the nylons free. 

His hands grab her shirt and he pulls her down into him and kisses her, hard, before letting her go. The feel of his lips sears her and Brienne's body is on fire just from that one furious press of their mouths together. 

They stare at each other from inches apart, both wrecked in entirely different ways, and Brienne touches her fingers to her lips. 

“I'll clean us up,” Jaime says roughly, moving around her to grab tissues from a box on her desk and wiping himself off first, then kneeling to clean her ankle and calf. 

They're quiet as Brienne pulls her cold wet panties back on, as Jaime gets his pants and shirt on and leaves the rest tucked over his arm. 

“Was that-- Are you okay?” she asks him as he runs his hand through his hair. 

“Mostly,” he says, and the smugness is gone now but she's not sure what it's been replaced with. He seems...lost, almost. She feels the same. 

She remembers the website she'd read talking about aftercare and she touches his shoulder gently and he goes stiff. “Do you need anything?”

“A glass of water. Maybe a whole bottle of whiskey.” He's trying to sound light but it's not the same as it was before. He rubs his hand down his face. “I'm not going to not kiss you,” he says, soft, almost tenderly. 

“What?”

“I'm not going to agree to no kissing. This isn't...whatever this is, it's more than just--” he waves at her chair. “No kissing is a dealbreaker.” 

“Fine,” she says, “but only during...when we're together like this.” 

He purses his lips, but he nods. “All right.” Jaime exhales slowly and seems to come back to himself and he tilts his head as he looks at her. “Can we seal it with a kiss?” he asks. 

She should say no. It would absolutely be the prudent thing to do, because the request is already outside of the bounds of what she's said she'll allow; the kissing itself is outside the bounds of what she wanted to allow at all. 

“Yes,” she says and the way his eyes light with pleasure is enough to make her knees wobble. He sets his jacket back down on the chair and walks towards her, takes her head in his hands, and rubs his thumbs over her cheeks as he searches her eyes. She wants him to kiss her more than she's wanted him to do anything he's done so far, but she's far more terrified than she's been before, too. 

Jaime kisses her softly, and his lips are as warm and wet and talented as she'd feared and she sighs into his mouth before she can stop herself. He breaks the kiss just as she's leaning into him and he runs his fingers once over her jaw, a tender move she feels in her chest, before letting her go. 

“Good night, boss,” he says, gathering his discarded clothes and holding them against his chest. 

Brienne swallows and rasps, “Good night, Jaime.” 

For everything they've done, it's the memory of his lips that she can't shake all weekend.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the first time she doesn't have a plan when five pm rolls near. Last week, of course, she'd prepared thoroughly. The two times before that her goal had been to bring him in line. But tonight as she watches the digital clock on her computer change to 4:59, she realizes she doesn't know what she wants from him and she panics. There have to be rules, there has to be a guardrail or all her desires might just drive them off the cliff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Current events have been terrible for my ability to focus on work but amazing for my ability to write escapist fic. I did not expect to return to this story so soon, but here you go. Shorter than usual with a slightly higher FPP (Feelings Per Paragraph) rating.

After Friday – the intensity, the kiss – things between them turn both more fraught and more playful. Monday morning she shows up and he's holding her coffee out to her and when she takes it he rubs his thumb over her fingers and smiles. The pad of his thumb is much hotter than the coffee, his smile more energizing than the caffeine. 

Tuesday afternoon they're arguing over the best way to word the memo she's writing when he stops mid-sentence and says, “You look incredible.”

She gapes at him from where she's standing by the window. Brienne paces whenever they argue, it helps her thinking to have her body in motion, but Jaime always sits in his chair and wields his thoughts with brief slices of his hands as he gestures, can make a whole point land harder just in how he shifts or folds one leg over the other. He follows up with: “I think you should take out that entire introductory paragraph, it makes you sound weak,” and she's honestly so staggered by the subject change that she does as he says without complaint. It helps that he's right; he's always good at coming up behind her and ensuring she doesn't leave in the unnecessary apologies and hemming she is constantly fighting to keep out of her missives. It's a struggle to not prod him further about his other comment but she doesn't, she puts her fingers on the keyboard and types and feels him watching her. 

Wednesday he stands next to her chair – the chair she'd tied him to, a fact she remembers every morning when she sees it again – and he leans over her desk while he shows her a funny video and she laughs with him surrounded by his scent and his warmth. His laugh is rich and soothing as gourmet hot chocolate and melts as easily on her tongue when she opens her mouth to taste it on the air. Jaime stares at her drinking him in and abruptly stands and leaves her office without a word. He is reserved the rest of the afternoon. 

Thursday he's in late, for him, and by the time he shows up at nine with everyone else she's not pacing her office but she's made a few circuits checking the parking lot through the window and then going back to her desk. She certainly _could_ have texted him – she has his cell number and he never sent an email explaining his delay – but it feels too needy and familiar to admit she was worried. Those morning hours have become, she realizes, their time. They both get in around seven, sometimes earlier, and they're almost always the first ones in the office. He brings her coffee and they talk about the plan for the day and she thinks about kneeling over his face, about him coming hard in her office chair, about their brutally tender kiss. 

Jaime's a little off all day; nothing she can pinpoint specifically, but something is wrong. He snarks and sparks and smiles but it feels strained, more a show he's putting on than anything. It also feels like it's not because of her, so she doesn't ask because that's not what they're doing here, but she wonders about it all night. 

Friday hits and the constant low simmer of desire she's been maintaining all week boils over with expectation and when he comes into the office at their usual time it's a wonder she's not vibrating. 

“Good morning,” he says first, cautiously, and she wonders where that comes from. 

“Do you have plans after work?” she blurts out and then clamps her mouth shut and tries to look like she doesn't care about his answer. 

“I'm having dinner with my family,” he says and she is stunned by the disappointment that swipes its claws across her chest, by the faint rough rasping lick of betrayal. Fridays are _our_ days she wants to say, though that's not true. They don't have days, they don't have commitment, they just have his impatient prodding and her tightly held reins and the office. 

“Of course,” she says and she's proud of how accepting she does sound. 

“It's not until eight, though,” he adds. “We're late eaters. My father's fault, he's always worked too late for a normal dinner time.” 

Brienne swallows down the smile that wants to claim her face. “Then can you stay a little? I could use your help.” She keeps up the pretense that she wants him for work even though no one else is there and they both know it will be the work of their bodies in which she intends to employ him: lips, fingers, tongue. 

“Sure, boss.” It's so casually delivered she wonders if he's lost interest in this, except his eyes are far too dark, his mouth is slightly too open. His fingers press into the top of his desk like he's steadying himself and she nods and retreats to her office and barely looks at him when he delivers her coffee a few minutes later. 

For the first time she doesn't have a plan when five pm rolls near. Last week, of course, she'd prepared thoroughly. The two times before that her goal had been to bring him in line. But tonight as she watches the digital clock on her computer change to 4:59, she realizes she doesn't know what she wants from him and she panics. There have to be rules, there has to be a guardrail or all her desires might just drive them off the cliff. 

The door to her office opens and Jaime hesitates in the doorway when she looks up at him. He's tall and handsome even in the unflattering office light; white polo shirt unbuttoned at his throat, khaki slacks snug around his thighs. Jaime's golden hair hangs loose and tempting to her fingers along his collar. 

Him, she thinks. She wants _him_. 

Brienne stands and he tenses in anticipation as she does. Jaime steps inside on her brief nod, closes and locks her door as she draws the blinds and turns off the overhead light. They don't say a word. When they turn to look at each other she hears his thoughts anyway and then he's striding towards her, three long steps and pulling her into him like he's grabbing at a lifesaver to keep from drowning. He kisses her like she's the one he's drowning in. 

She curls her fingers in his hair and tugs his head back to gulp down air and sanity and he turns his mouth to her neck instead, urges her back towards her desk and she lets him direct her until her ass is pressed against the sharp edge. His hands slide down to her hips and he gathers himself a little and lifts her like it's nothing and the first noise that she's made since he opened the door is a shocked gasp at the ease with which he does it. 

After that he's all noise: he moans low in his throat and attacks her blouse with his hands, her jaw and neck and collarbone with his mouth. She's spiraling already and clutches his broad shoulders like he'll hold her in place even though it's him that's pulling her down. 

“You taste good,” he says and “you smell good” and “you feel good” and she bunches the fabric of his shirt in her fists as his hands skim over her waist and up to her breasts, under her silk bra, fingers and thumbs massaging and plucking and pulling heat from all over and pouring it down through her body until her hips are restless against his. It's too much, she's not directing him at all, he's owning all of this, all of _her_ and she cannot allow it. 

“Wait,” she gasps, and he goes still immediately, though his pelvis surges once against her before he stops. “I want...” she's breathing too hard, she's got no idea what she wants from him but she has to say something. “Your fingers,” she says finally and her cunt clenches in eager anticipation. “I want you to use your fingers on me.” 

“Yes, boss,” he murmurs against her chest. He's got her suit pants unzipped moments later, he's tugging at them to pull them off and she leans back to lift her ass off the desk so he can and the sound he makes when she does is a desperate whimper. He presses a kiss against her knee as he tugs her pants down and kneels to slip her shoes off and Brienne feels the gentle burn of his lips like a brand. Jaime handles her legs and feet gently, throws her pants over the back of his chair and looks at her lying back on her elbows on her desk, her shirt open to show her rucked up bra, her pants off to show her matching red silk panties and he curses low. 

Brienne wants to say something but the desire transforming him is too beautiful – golden cheeks flushed red, broad chest heaving, eyes all devouring pupil. He's a sinner's angel, and her words fail her entirely. Instead she rolls her hips up once towards him and he presses his palm against her center, warm and enveloping and she cries out a little in relief. 

Jaime leans down to take her nipple in his mouth and she cries out more loudly then, louder still when he slips his hand down her underwear and slides his thick, strong fingers between the lips of her cunt. He's close enough now that she shifts up to one palm and uses the other to undo his belt, his button and zipper opening quick as a miracle, and she's got her hand around his cock through his underwear. Jaime stutters against her when she touches him and then lets her breasts go long enough to help her yank his pants and underwear down, too. 

“Shirt,” she orders, and he's still using one hand to rub mercilessly along her cunt, brushing her clit with just the knuckle of his thumb, and when he takes it away her body arches after him and he grins at her like a conquering hero. He should look ridiculous mostly naked except for his pants pooled at his ankles, his shoes still on, his cock bobbing and already wet. He doesn't, of course. “Fuck you,” she says without any heat and he lifts an eyebrow in playful disbelief. 

“I'd love if you did,” he says, leaning back towards her. She grabs his cock and it would be simple to tug aside the thin fabric of her panties and take him inside her, but instead she pulls him long and slow with one hand and rubs her other palm all over his body, scratching her nails down the long valley of his back, clenching at the firm muscle of his ass. 

Jaime plunges two fingers inside her without warning and she whines high-pitched and needy and clutches him more tightly with all of her. 

“Gods,” he groans into the sweat-covered curve of her shoulder. He strokes the walls of her cunt with one hand while his other flexes and opens against her hip, twisting in the band of her underwear. They're kissing again and Brienne's not sure who started it this time but his tongue is moving in time with his fingers and she opens to both of them, pulling him in. 

Brienne slides her hand over the top of his slippery cock and rubs and twists the length of it against her thigh. Their hands are a barrier between his cock and her cunt and she's grateful for it, for the feel of his now three fingers inside her, of his wrist banging into hers as they fight for the limited space between their heaving bodies. On a whim, she slides her other hand between his ass and presses lightly at the rim of his hole and Jaime releases a loud, craving, desperate, “ _Fuck_ ” that reverberates through her blood and that's when they hear “Jaime?” from outside. 

It is very distinctly Tywin Lannister's voice and they go absolutely still, the only remaining noise their short, gasping breaths as they stare at each other in disbelief. 

“I thought these doors were soundproof?” Brienne hisses. 

“It came from outside. Is your window open?” he whispers intensely back. 

She groans a little, but not from pleasure, even though his fingers are still deep inside her. She'd opened her window earlier that afternoon to let in some fresh air and been so distracted by him that she hadn't closed it again. 

His phone starts ringing from his jacket hanging over the chair and then there are footsteps and they're heading back towards the office building. 

Jaime starts thrusting his fingers again, his other hand sliding from her hip to her clit and she lets him go to grab his wrists. 

“What are you _doing_?” she whisper-yells. 

He presses his lips gently to her ear. “Can you get dressed before he makes it to the office? No? Then we may as well enjoy it.” Jaime pulls at her clit and twists his wrist to escape her grasp and she cries out low. “Quietly now,” he says, his cock thrusting into her hand. 

_This is madness_ , she thinks and she lets it overtake her. Their bodies are sweaty and urgent against each other, their hands sliding and grasping and reaching for more. Jaime's fingers are relentless on and in her, his mouth is a volcano against her skin. He rips her useless underwear away and Brienne feels mad with lust and need and she's whimpering into his neck, her pleading lost in the sound of Jaime's fingers plunging in and out of her. She imagines she can hear Tywin Lannister's inexorable footsteps as he searches for his son, who is currently moaning into her ear, their thighs sweaty and slipping together. It takes every atom of willpower she has not to scream when Jaime's phone rings once more and he crooks his fingers upward as he slides them in. Instead she bites down hard on his shoulder as her world shatters down around her in severe, ripping shards, slicing her apart on the way. 

It takes her awhile to gather the pieces together again, discovers when she finally does that he's come hot in her hand and against her thigh. He's pressing his forehead against her breastbone, her lips and nose are buried in his golden hair. His phone rings. 

When it stops ringing they hear Tywin outside again. “Jaime, I see your car in the parking lot but I don't see you. I was going to drive you straight to my home so you're not late for once. Hopefully you got a ride with Kevan instead. I'll see you later. Eight pm.” 

Brienne's got most of her reality put back together by then and it's easy to hear when Tywin's car pulls away, even over the sound of their deep breathing. 

“That was close,” she says into Jaime's hair, and his shoulders hitch with his soft laugh. She traces the mark she's left with her teeth and he shivers a little at her touch; it will leave a bruise. She feels a fierce, reckless pride. 

“Next time close the window,” he says against her chest, before he groans softly and stands, stretching his back and his fingers. 

“Next time don't keep going when someone else is nearby,” she snaps and he glares at her. 

“You didn't tell me to stop.”

“I didn't think I'd have to.”

He steps into her space and she smells him: sweat and sex and herself on his fingers when he gently grips her chin. “Then in the future, assume if I've got my hands on you, nothing will make me stop. Only you.”

Brienne swallows hard and looks past him to the door. “You should go,” she says. “You'll need to clean yourself up before your dinner.”

His lip curls before he kisses her rough and annoyed and wanting and then he backs away. “Anything you say, Ms. Tarth,” he sneers, pulling his clothes on with quick, ferocious jerks. 

“Jaime,” she says and he tugs his shirt down and looks at her and he looks so hopeful but she doesn't know for what. Does he want her to beg him to stay? To take her to his family dinner? To put an end to this before she gets them both hurt? 

“Have a good weekend,” she offers. 

His face twists, sarcasm and sweetness all mixed up as he says, “You too.”

He leaves her there with his essence and his scent and, she realizes as she's putting herself back together, everything but her underwear, which have disappeared. Brienne goes to the window and opens the blinds and Jaime is waiting half in his car and looking right at her. He waves something small and red before he gets in and drives away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit where it is due to sameboots who suggested Jaime should definitely steal Brienne's underwear at some point.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She should never have agreed to the kissing. It's given him confidence he doesn't need, given him closeness he shouldn't have earned. Given her a fantasy she returns to time and again of the soft press of his lips to hers, acting like all he wanted from her was tenderness and nothing else. There has to be a line and she has to draw it here or else he will become another Renly and she cannot bear that. Not now, when she's worked so hard to get here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning: things remain smutty but they get angstier before it gets resolved. I have about 75% of the last four chapters written so hopefully I can get all of it done and then can post chapters relatively quickly so we don't have to live in the sad part too long. Heh.

“I need a hobby,” Brienne says to her empty living room that weekend when she's checking her work email for the tenth time. She's got her favorite comfort show on in the background and her apartment is clean and none of that has stopped her from thinking about Jaime. 

She goes to the gym and works out until her limbs are trembling, and she thinks about Jaime. She sleeps, badly, and wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks about Jaime. She's angrier than she's ever been at him even though it's not really even his fault. It's her own desires that are betraying her. 

She should never have agreed to the kissing. It's given him confidence he doesn't need, given him closeness he shouldn't have earned. Given her a fantasy she returns to time and again of the soft press of his lips to hers, acting like all he wanted from her was tenderness and nothing else. There has to be a line and she has to draw it here or else he will become another Renly and she cannot bear that. Not now, when she's worked so hard to get here. 

Brienne looks at herself in the mirror Monday morning – six am and she's already dressed and ready to go and if she were her own friend she'd just shake her head sadly at her self-delusion – and she wonders what Jaime did with her underwear. Did he take them to his father's house, tucked in the pocket of his pants, a small bulge that no one would notice? Did he look at them and rub them on himself and mark them as his own? Or, as she suspects, did he throw them away, having served their purpose in pulling him a step ahead of her on this path they're crashing through in the dark? 

When Brienne walks by Jaime's desk at work an hour later, he doesn't have his feet up on it but he might as well with the look he gives her. He pats the pocket of his pants and smirks and she flushes deeply when she sees a hint of red fabric peeking out. 

He's brought her ripped underwear into work with him. 

She knows she should demand them back but she's too flustered to do more than duck her head and escape into her office. As she connects her laptop to start her day all she can think of is _why?_

A few minutes later Jaime comes in and she can see her underwear still, a hint of red peeking out, like when his tongue darts from his lips as he stares boldly at her. 

“Good morning,” he says, his tone just as forceful as his eyes. 

“Is that my coffee?” She knows it is and she focuses intently on her computer booting up as he comes over and sets it down on her desk. “That's all for now,” she says and Jaime leans towards her a little, shifts his hip so she cannot miss the red like a signal flag in his pocket. Her face heats but she doesn't ask about them at all. 

Jaime leaves her then, a knight who's forcibly taken her favor and she hasn't taken it back. She's sure he expected her to grab them, to make a fuss and order them returned, but she won't play his game. No matter how many times she tries to tell him, no matter how much he outwardly protests he isn't, he still believes he's in charge here. The only thing he's in charge of is his recusal. As long as he plays, he must play by her rules. He didn't lie when they talked after the second time, though: he's pushing the limits of those rules at every turn. 

They should never have kissed. 

When they part that evening, he tells her goodbye with one hand shoved in the pocket that holds her underwear and she can see his fingers moving, rubbing the fabric. _Good_ she thinks. Maybe he'll think of her as much as she thinks of him. He's not just pushing the line by bringing her underwear in and letting her know, he's erasing it. He is clearly desperate for her to say _something_. No response is the only possible response if she wants to stay ahead. 

It gets worse the next afternoon. 

It doesn't start out that way; he doesn't bring the underwear into work, or at least she doesn't see them if he does, and he's quiet and a little tense and the all-knowing smirk is gone. It's a relief to see he's pulled back from the edge and she relaxes through the day as he continues to stay in line. 

That afternoon, Kevan is droning on, reading out word-for-word the PowerPoint slides he'd sent that morning and which Brienne has already thoroughly reviewed in preparation for this meeting. She's in her office and Jaime is, too, slouched with his head leaning backward over the edge of his chair, and she's watching his throat bob and move as he tries to keep himself awake. The door is closed so her conference call doesn't float out into the hallway, disturbing other people, which makes her mildly uncomfortable. Usually when she and Jaime are alone in her office with the door closed, they aren't working.

She checks that she's still on mute before saying, “You can go back to your desk, you don't have to suffer through this, too.”

He lifts his head enough to look at her. “You invited me to sit in.”

“I did, back when I thought it would be useful for you to better understand the business.” She's been inviting him to more things like this, listening in on her calls and helping her craft emails. Partially because as heir to the Lannister Corporation she wants him to someday actually understand what the business does so he'll run it well, but also because she's discovered she does better work when she has him to bounce her ideas off of and it takes too much time getting him up to speed when he's not there. 

“My uncle does like to hear his own voice.”

“Must be a Lannister trait,” she says wryly, and Jaime grins at her. 

Kevan moves on to the next slide on the shared screen, but when she glances at the numbers he's still only on 9 out of 36 and it's been thirty-five minutes already. Brienne checks her calendar and groans when she sees the scheduled meeting block is for two hours. She cradles her head in her hands until she hears Jaime stand. 

“Save yourself,” she says, waving him off, but he shakes his head a little and comes around to her side of the desk with a small, knowing smile. “What are you doing?” She glances at her screen again; still muted. 

“You seem tense,” he says, kneeling down next to the side of her chair. The heat and smell of him wash over her, his buzzing energy pressing against her own without them even touching, like his aura is a physical thing. It must be, because her skin is tingling, her breath catching in her throat. “And you never want me to massage you.” 

“It seems wrong,” she mumbles and he chuckles. 

“There are other ways to relax,” he assures her, sliding his hand under the armrest and along her stomach. She jumps a little, but he just rests his hand there against her belly, firm and warm and patient. 

Kevan moves to the next slide and Brienne focuses on the screen. Or she tries to, but Jaime's rubbing small circles on her abdomen now and her muscles are trembling under his gentle touch and Kevan's presentation is boring as shit but she should be paying attention. Jaime undoes the button of her pants in a smooth motion and she doesn't tell him to stop.

“Let's take a look at manufacturing numbers,” Kevan says. Jaime dips his hand below the waistband of her pants and she gasps when his fingers brush the top of her underwear. 

“This isn't very relaxing,” she says, checking - _again_ \- that they're muted. 

Jaime leans into her, until his lips are brushing her cheek as he whispers, “You'll be relaxed at the end of it.” 

He journeys farther down, still on top of her underwear but when his hand palms her through the fabric he grins, leonine and hungry. “I didn't know manufacturing numbers got you so wet,” he murmurs. 

She laughs in spite of herself and there is a responding brightness to his eyes that makes her uncomfortably warm all over. “What did you do with my underwear?” she asks abruptly, needing to hear him say he threw them away, to remind him of what she didn't demand yesterday. 

His hand stills over her cunt. “I kept them,” he says, his voice so low it's like distant thunder, half-heard and half-imagined. 

“Why?” she asks hoarsely. 

He doesn't answer. Instead, Jaime unzips her pants and with the extra room he slides his fingers under the elastic of her underwear, over her already-aching clit. Brienne gasps and grabs the arms of her chair with the same intensity he had when he'd been tied to it. All her attention is captured by the rough pressure of his fingers between the lips of her cunt. 

Her blinds are open and her door is unlocked and even this would be impossible to come back from if someone were to come in, but she shifts so Jaime can fit his hand better in her pants. 

“That's good,” he murmurs, and he's looking up at her from on his knees, smug and knowing and, most troubling of all, happy. It would be easy to lean over and kiss him. Easy and impossible. 

“Why did you keep them?” she asks again, insistent, and his lips twist and thin and the happiness flares up and dies even as his fingers press inside her and she whimpers. 

“Why does it matter?” 

Brienne's thighs clench against his arm. He's got his other hand braced near her elbow, and he snakes it up behind her now, rests it against the back of her neck. He's got two fingers in her cunt and she moves to give him space to thrust them slowly in and out, to stroke her from the inside until she has to bite back a moan dragged loose by the rough pads of his fingertips. 

“I need to know,” she says, her voice too high and needy. 

Jaime lifts up so she can feel his lips on her ear as he says, “I wake up hard every morning, thinking about you. Now I can smell you when I masturbate.” 

The groan that climbs from her throat shocks even her and she looks anxiously at her phone but she's still muted, thank fuck. His fingers are twisting and circling inside of her, opening her up, driving her deeper and she's rolling her hips in her chair, tugging at her pants to pull them down to her thighs at least, opens her legs so he can use a third finger, which he does even though she hasn't asked him out loud. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” she lets slip and Jaime's hand on the back of her neck is tight, circling and digging in in steady, soothing motions. This pushy ass is giving her a massage, she realizes, and she's about to snap at him when Kevan interrupts them. 

“What do you think, Brienne?”

They both go completely still and Jaime, for all his wicked smile, lets her lean forward and unmute with trembling fingers. “Sorry, I-I missed the question, can you repeat?” she asks, barely controlling her breathing. Jaime's fingers are still knuckle-deep in her cunt. 

Kevan sighs impatiently. “What do you think of our ability to meet the quarter three goals?”

“Oh,” she says just as Jaime pumps his fingers in and out of her and her voice squeaks up at the end. Brienne clamps her thighs together so tightly around his wrist he hisses. She glares furiously at him. “I think, uh, we'll need to direct more funding towards the factories in Lannisport if we want to be sure,” she says, still holding Jaime's burning, rebellious stare. He can't move at all, except for the pads of his fingers which he wiggles a little inside her and she inhales and clenches tightly all around him. “Otherwise,” she manages to say, and she's never been so grateful for her meticulous meeting preparation habits, “we may be paying extra in overtime as we near the end. Better to hire people now and account for continued projected growth.” 

“That seems reasonable. Lancel?” 

Brienne slams the mute button back on and opens her legs and Jaime plunges his fingers in and out of her so hard it should hurt but it doesn't, she's already on fire and he's just adding more fuel. Brienne grabs his hair with both hands and yanks his head back and kisses him, her tongue thrusting in his mouth. He takes it greedily, sucking and fighting for more. The hand on her neck is an iron band holding her against him. She's pressed painfully against the firm metal of the chair arm and her pants are halfway down and Kevan is still getting opinions from everyone else on the call even though hers was the right answer and for once she doesn't care about any of that because Jaime is fucking her cunt hard with his fingers and she's fucking his mouth hard with her tongue. 

Jaime pulls away first, and he's breathing so loudly she's sure everyone can hear him. He slides his fingers out of her but it's only so he can spin her chair and crawl between her legs. He buries his face in her cunt while she loses her mind trying not to scream at the heat of his tongue. 

She manages, mostly, although she has to shove her wrist in her mouth when he adds his fingers again a minute later in a full assault on her cunt that she is incapable of resisting. Her orgasm is as bone-deep as an earthquake and it pulls her apart in a silence punctuated by her coworkers' bullshit ideas and her own trapped cries. 

When she slumps back in her chair, Jaime doesn't stop. She can barely breathe so she shoves him away with her foot and he falls onto his ass and stares up at her and for a long moment she can see exactly what's going to happen next: he'll drag her down on top of him, he'll thrust inside her and fill her more fully than his fingers ever could, he'll whisper his thoughts into her skin until she's marked all over. 

Kissing him has opened up too many holes in the emotional wall between them and he's rushing through faster than she can plug it up again. 

“Don't,” she says when his fingers touch her calf and he jerks them away like she's a flame.

“You want this,” he tells her, as though he knows her. The call is still going on, her door is still unlocked, the blinds are still open. She does want it, but he cannot know. 

Brienne swallows hard. “No, I don't.” 

“You're lying.” Jaime climbs to his feet. From this angle he looms over her, but she's not afraid. For everything that is surging and fierce and fighting between them, she trusts him. She reaches for his cock straining in his pants and he grabs her wrist. “Leave it,” he says tightly. “I'll be fine.” 

The way he awkwardly walks to the door suggests that isn't true. Brienne hastily tugs her pants up and closes them and she can smell her own arousal soaking through her underwear. 

“You're lying,” she says and he stills and stares at the door. The broad plane of his shoulders could be made of granite. She's the only one who's come and yet she still feels like the control has shifted entirely to him. “You want this, too.” 

“No, I don't,” he says. They're both liars. He slams the door shut a little too hard when he leaves. 

Brienne's body is satisfied but there's an uncomfortable ache in her chest that makes it impossible to focus the rest of the day.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When he smiles, it's with a jaw tight and stretched like a drum. When she talks to him about the meetings she needs scheduled, she can never quite meet his eyes. It's not shame that's between them. It's a desire so vast the only way to handle it is to pretend it doesn't exist. Brienne has known the taste of it before and it sits familiar on her tongue now; the weight of all the lies they're not saying out loud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had this chapter written for a few weeks now, so tuning it up went quickly. I've got the next chapter about half-done so hopefully it will be posted as well in the next day or two. Kink warning for this chapter is angsty semi-public phone sex. 
> 
> Also if you're looking for a song that captures Brienne's whole vibe in this fic, I've been listening to Natalie Merchant's "My Skin" a lot while writing.

The next few days, Jaime smirks like he always does, she ignores it like she always does, and they go through the ballet of their regular routine like nothing has changed. 

Except. 

When he smiles, it's with a jaw tight and stretched like a drum. When she talks to him about the meetings she needs scheduled, she can never quite meet his eyes. It's not shame that's between them. It's a desire so vast the only way to handle it is to pretend it doesn't exist. Brienne has known the taste of it before and it sits familiar on her tongue now; the weight of all the lies they're not saying out loud. 

Friday comes and goes and Jaime leaves at four with everyone else and she wishes him a good weekend and lets him go. Brienne is too afraid to touch him in case it breaks loose a truth, and her hands feel empty all night. 

She is restless even into Saturday. Not the restlessness of last weekend, which was borne on waves of anticipation; instead she feels unfulfilled. There is something missing and the outline of it is unequivocally Jaime-shaped and it irritates her. She thinks about him at unexpected moments, and that irritates her, too: when she's rubbing lotion into her dry elbows, when she sees a cute dog on her walk to the gym, when she's alone and it's quiet and all she wants is to not think about him.

When not thinking about him fails to work, she calls him Saturday night, ready to snap. She barely has time to regret it before he answers the phone. 

Instead of “hi” he says “What do you want, boss?” In the question she can hear the answer he hopes for, loud over the sounds around him, voices chattering nearby. 

“Are you on a date?” she asks, an opening salvo so explosive she almost hangs up to try to hide from the blowback. 

“No,” he says, defusing the worst of it.

“Where are you?”

“At a bar-- no, it's my boss, shut up will you?” He's covering the phone and that last part is distanced and sounds like it's being squeezed through cotton. Then the noise sparks again when he lifts the phone back to his mouth. “Can you hold on a second? I'll go somewhere quieter.”

“No,” she says quickly, “stay where you are.” _What do I want?_ She didn't know when she was dialing his number, but she knows now. “Where you are is perfect.” 

There's just the noise for a moment – someone in the background yells something unintelligible and there's laughter in response; she thinks she hears the strains of a rock song she likes – and then Jaime, louder than all of it: “Okay. So what do you need?”

Brienne wants to laugh at the question. _I need to hang up and never do this again_ , she thinks. _I need to move on with my life. I need--_ She doesn't even let herself think the last one. 

“I need you to listen very carefully,” she says out loud. It was Jaime who twisted the lines she had drawn, wrapping them around her until he had her trapped; it's only fair that she untwist them and put them back. “I want you to sit there and listen to me while I tell you what I'm doing to myself.” His mouth must be close to the speaker because his intake of breath is loud over the background noise. 

“I can just hang up on you,” he says, low and a little muffled, like he's trying to hide his face from his friends. 

“You won't.” This is the most in control she's felt with him for weeks as she starts unbuttoning her blouse. Brienne has engaged in phone sex before, although usually it's the man who talks dirty to her, but it's easy to talk to Jaime. It's too easy to talk to Jaime. “You'll sit between your friends and listen to me come, knowing you can't touch yourself at all.” 

Taking charge is simple when she can't see his face, although by now she can picture it well enough: the cut of his freshly shaven jaw, his golden hair artfully mussed, eyes as green and gleaming as emeralds. Brienne imagines him at a tall bar table or, even better, trapped in a booth with his beautiful friends on either side of him. They're not as attractive as he is – no one is, that's a bridge too far for even her imagination – but they're more good-looking than she is. It doesn't matter, though, because Jaime is sitting in-between them, the phone clutched to his ear with his unbearably strong hand, and he's getting hard because of her. 

“Go on,” he says and his voice is normal, maybe a little rough around the edges but nothing that will alert anyone sitting near him.

She's got her shirt un-done and it's easy to slide her hand around and unsnap her bra, shrug everything off and let it pool on the floor. The cool air of her apartment makes her shiver as she pads in her pants and bare feet to her bed. “I'm getting naked,” she tells him and then, because the silence is starting to feel too deep and she doesn't want to rush to fill it with her own nerves, she asks, “what are you doing at the bar?”

“Birthday party for a friend. A group of us are splitting shots equal to his age.” There's a scratching sound, and the bar noises and Jaime's voice float out like he's underwater: “Nah, you guys keep going. She needs me to help her work out a problem. I'll be fine here, I mostly just have to listen and make noises, you know how it is.” A deep voice next to him mumbles something and then Jaime laughs. “If you were more serious about your work, you'd be this wanted, too.” 

Brienne stills as her pants slip down her legs to pool at her feet. Want. She's wanted many things in her life but gotten very few: her scholarship at King's Landing University, her first job, this promotion. There are men she's wanted and not gotten, men she's gotten and not wanted. Renly, whom she had wanted and gotten and lost. And now there's Jaime. 

“You still there?” he asks, bright and loud in her quiet bedroom. 

“Yes.” She tugs off her panties and pulls her comforter down. It's nothing special: old cotton, shorter at one corner where she'd fixed a tear once when she couldn't afford to buy a new one. She's not sure why she hasn't bought new bedding since her promotion. She can afford it now and if Jaime –

Brienne pushes that idea away. She will not let him in here. It's been a long time since there's been anyone in her bedroom besides her, and if they do fuck, it won't be here, in her home, in the place where she can just be Brienne. “I'm lying in bed now, and I'm naked on my very expensive sheets.” She rubs her fingers over a small stain on the tired fabric under her body. “Do you think I'm wet already, Jaime?”

“Yes,” he says quickly. 

“Should I touch myself and find out?”

“Yes.” 

“Can you say anything besides yes?” she asks, rubbing the skin of her stomach. It's soft on top, firm underneath. She works hard to keep herself in shape, knows that the coiled power of her muscles is sexy to the type of men that would fuck her, and she thinks it's sexy to her, too. She feels sexy sometimes when she sees the bunch of her calves as she's soaping herself in the shower, or when she's pulling on a t-shirt and her biceps curl against the sleeves. 

“Yes,” he says, amused, and since he's not here she smiles, too. 

“What's the name of your friend, the one having a birthday?”

“Addam.” 

She lets her fingers trail up towards her breasts. “Do you think Addam would like it if I fucked him for his birthday?” she asks, not knowing why. Every part of her feels not quite herself.

“I could ask him,” Jaime says and his tone is too light and she realizes why she asked and her hand stops, palm pressed flat against her heart. There's no reason to want jealousy from Jaime. There's nothing between them but sex and release and control offered and accepted. 

She is tempted – foolishly, brilliantly tempted – to make Jaime ask anyway; to send him a picture of her naked legs as proof to his friend that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, to make Jaime tell his friend why Jaime wants to fuck her so she can hear it and understand for herself, but she shakes her head hard. It doesn't matter why. The why of any of this is pointless; they're doing it and enjoying it and that's all she wants. 

“No need,” she says. “I'm pulling at my nipples now, they're getting tight under my fingers.”

“Are they?” he murmurs and it sounds like he's next to her in her bed. She closes her eyes. In the dark she could be lying on his bed just as easily. He would have silk sheets. Dark colors, she thinks. Burgundy or rich purple. Something that makes him feel royal, the young prince he is. 

“Say something,” she commands him. 

“What do you want me to say, Ms. Tarth?” 

She wants him to talk her through it, to hear his voice slide sinuous and heated through her blood. He won't, where he is, so she has to talk for both of them. 

“You told them I was bouncing ideas off of you. Shouldn't you say something?”

“If you think that's a good idea.”

She massages her breast, presses her thighs together. She feel her cunt leaking already. “Which way should I move my hands, Jaime? Up to my mouth to pretend it's you I'm sucking or down to my clit?” 

“I'm a fan of the second choice,” he says, and the rough edge is louder now. It scrapes across her skin with her nails. 

“You are, aren't you?” It's dark behind her eyes and dark in the room she's imagining them in. It could be his hand petting the bushy hairs at her center, his finger sneaking between her folds and lightly touching the swollen flesh there. She gasps into the phone, knowing she needs to be loud so he can hear her because he's not really here, he's at some nameless bar with his friends. 

“Are there women with you?” she asks and her eyes open and she's back in her bedroom. There's a photo of her and her university rugby team on the new dresser she bought a couple of months ago to replace the one she'd purchased at a box store that had been made of particle board and paperclips. 

“What?” he asks, confused. 

“At your friend's party. Is it men and women, or just men?”

“Both. Why?”

 _Are they beautiful? Do you want them?_ she almost asks. _Would you rather one of them were the boss you were fucking around with instead of me?_

She doesn't know how to answer his question in a way that doesn't give away at least some of that so she ignores it. “I'm very wet,” she says instead, and she is, though her need has receded some. 

“Maybe I should go,” he says in a voice that sounds almost tired. 

“We're just getting started,” she says hurriedly. “Do you have an erection yet?”

“I did,” he says. 

“That's too bad, because I'd like to imagine it swelling in your pants. If I were sitting next to you I could feel it myself, with all your friends around us. Would they notice my hand on your cock under the table? Would they see the way my palm is holding you down? Would I be able to feel your desire with my fingertips?”

His breathing goes hard for a moment. “It would be obvious now.” 

She exhales in relief, presses her hand flat against herself and shudders a little. “You recovered so quickly,” she teases him. “I suppose that's a good thing about you being twenty-four. How many times do you think I could make you come in an hour, Jaime?”

“I'm not entirely sure, boss.”

“Three times?” He scoffs and the arrogance of it slices through her, makes her want more. “Four? Five? How many until you're wrung out?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

She can hear him thinking, trying to put the right words together with his friends partying right by him. “On how committed you are.”

“You're doing such a good job of talking around this. I'm sure none of them knows that I've got my fingers sliding along my wetness as I listen to you. I'm aching for more. I want to push my fingers inside but I don't know if I'm ready. Do you think I'm ready?”

“Yes.” It sounds like he's bitten off the word to keep it from being a moan. 

“This must be hard for you. You do love to talk. Even when I tell you not to, you can't help yourself. Are you sitting down?”

“Yes.”

“Is your cock painfully tight in your pants? Can you move at all without feeling the fabric rub all along you while you think of my hand instead? My mouth? Or are you holding yourself very still while I writhe here on my sheets, my fingers in my cunt?”

There is a long, long pause. 

“What is it?” she asks.

“I thought it would be easier.” His voice feels like it was cut from steel.

“But you want me too much,” she says and wishes she hadn't. 

There is no pause now when he answers, “Yes.”

“Jaime,” she whispers, a breathy moan, and he hisses a little through the line. Brienne closes her eyes again. They're back in his bedroom and those aren't his fingers she's imagining. “Your cock would be so thick and hard inside me,” she manages to say because it's so much safer when he's not really here. When the need comes from her own mind and not the feel of him against her. “You want to do that, don't you?” 

He makes a sort of growling agreement that curls in her belly. 

“I'm imagining you fucking me,” she says but not too loudly, not as loud as the moan she allows when she presses the heel of her thumb against her clit as she thrusts into herself with her fingers. “Are you still there? Are your friends all around you while I fuck myself and think of you?”

He doesn't say anything but she can hear the noise of the bar, the occasional heaving breath he permits himself in response. 

“Jaime,” she moans, and then again and again. She never says his name this much, it's too rich on her tongue. Her cunt is clenching eagerly for her fingers, and for more. “I asked you a question,” she whines with the need to hear him. She shouldn't want to hear him so much but she does. She wants his voice to spill into the spaces empty and yearning inside her and fill them up. 

_What do you need_ he'd asked. She shouldn't – she _can't_ – but she needs _him_. 

“Say something,” she pleads, hovering on the edge and stuck there with just his captive breaths and her own fingers. Her hips are rolling on the bed, her whole body taut and demanding more from her than she knows how to give it and the noise from the bar feels very loud and very far away all at once. She's the one who called him, the one who started this from the beginning, but all he has to do is hang up now and the power would be so fully in his hands she may as well quit her job and go work somewhere else. He could leave her here gasping and empty and missing him and she's berating herself and near to begging when he finally speaks.

“I wish I was there with you,” he says and it's so soft she almost misses it but his lips must be very close to the speaker because she can hear the brush of them in the words. “So I could show you--”

She cries out as her body bows up off the bed in a tight bridge, her thighs trapping her hand, and pulse after pulse of heat rushes from her center through the whole of her, the phone sliding from her hand to the mattress. Brienne rides out the aftershocks, trembling at the touch of her own fingers, unable to keep the panting whines from escaping her lips. 

When her hips still, she fumbles for her phone and brings it to her ear. There's the bar noise, a clank of glasses, a low cheer. It sounds different though, farther away. Jaime is still on the line; she can hear him breathing heavily. 

“Are you there?” he asks in a voice ragged as a tear. 

“Yes,” she exhales. 

“Are you still naked?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“The hallway. Are you in bed?”

“Yes.”

“Are you wet?” His voice is urgent and grasping. 

“Yes,” she whispers, her cunt clenching again. 

“Why did you call me? What do you want?” He sounds so desperate it hurts.

She offers him a truth, because she's wanted to for awhile and he's not here to demand more: “You.”

“ _Fuck_.” Jaime groans, low and stuttering. After a few seconds he laughs, but he doesn't sound amused. “You made me ruin another pair of pants.”

“I'm not sorry,” she says. 

“Brienne,” he sighs. She starts to protest but he continues over it: “Unless you're inviting me over, don't call me again.” He hangs up and in the silence she hears the echo of her name on his lips.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Monday morning they both arrive early to work, the two of them alone in her office while her coffee steams between them. Brienne stares avidly at his face and finds him perfect and perfectly composed. He's dressed neatly: tailored slacks, tailored shirt, hair styled into a business-appropriate wave. There's none of his usual Jaime-specific quirks. His shirt isn't unbuttoned slightly too far, his hair doesn't look like someone's been running their fingers through it, he's holding himself like a businessman and it doesn't suit him at all. Brienne recognizes armor when she sees it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million thanks to Kirazi, who looked this over to make sure the emotional navigation made sense, provided excellent insight and suggestions and support, and has just been an all-around swell person to talk to. <3 (ALSO if you haven't read her Ring Them Bells, you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD.) Next updates will take awhile, but they're coming! (And so are Brienne and Jaime. Ba-dum-tiss)
> 
> Kink notification for this chapter is pegging.

On Sunday, Brienne almost calls Jaime, although whether it's to break his rule or to invite him over she can't say. 

She doesn't call, and instead she spends the day wondering how much he hates her now. _He could've hung up_ , she reassures herself. She has to believe that, otherwise none of what is happening between them is okay the way it is, and the only two paths from there are going forward or falling back. She suspects those are her only two options now anyway, but she ignores that as long as she can. 

She can't stop hearing the grasping desire in his voice even as she falls asleep that night. 

Monday morning they both arrive early to work, the two of them alone in her office while her coffee steams between them. Brienne stares avidly at his face and finds him perfect and perfectly composed. He's dressed neatly: tailored slacks, tailored shirt, hair styled into a business-appropriate wave. There's none of his usual Jaime-specific quirks. His shirt isn't unbuttoned slightly too far, his hair doesn't look like someone's been running their fingers through it, he's holding himself like a businessman and it doesn't suit him at all. Brienne recognizes armor when she sees it.

“How was the rest of the party?” she asks before he can speak. She's too afraid of what he'll say if he goes first. 

“I left early.” 

“Sorry,” she says, and she is. She hadn't intended to ruin his night the way he keeps ruining hers without even trying. She hadn't intended to ruin his easy charm. Even when she holds the reins she still drives things off a cliff. 

“You don't have to apologize.”

“The base rule stands,” she blurts out, and he lifts one elegant eyebrow. “You only have to say stop.”

The coolly composed facade slips a little before he puts it back. “I have a request,” he says. 

“I won't call you again.” 

“It's not that.” Brienne holds her breath. She knows what's coming next. But ending things is the only non-negotiable rule they have; she just assumed it would be her doing it. 

Jaime presses his fingers into the top of her desk, releases them, presses again, releases, a steady, repetitive motion that tells her just how nervous he is even though his beautiful face is a mask of distant, godlike amusement. “I want you to fuck me,” he finally says, quickly and all at once on a huge exhale. 

Brienne's mind buzzes blank as the world rearranges itself under her feet. She hears the emphasis on _you_ and _me_ and she knows, just from the way he's saying it, what he wants. The image consumes her: Jaime laid out on a bed before her, legs spread open, his face--

“Why?” she gasps. 

His amusement sharpens and becomes real for a moment. “I'm sure you know the answer to that.” 

“But I haven't even let you--”

“That doesn't matter. I want you to do this. With me.” 

She still doesn't understand and it makes her cautious. “ _Why?_ ” she asks again and she means the question in every possible way ( _why now? why this? why_ me _?_ ) but she hopes he only hears the most obvious.

Jaime doesn't answer until the air grows heavy and Brienne cannot tell what he's thinking as he searches her face. “Because I want you to know that I trust you,” he eventually says. 

“Have you done this before?”

“Just to myself. Have you?”

Brienne's face goes hot and he smirks a little. “Fingers in others,” she says, “a couple of times.” 

“Then we're perfectly matched.” She hates the way her heart stutters out of turn. “So will you?”

She wants to, though it feels like a trap. But he hasn't hidden anything from her yet, and she can still say no at any time, too. “Yes,” she says now. “Do you...should I bring my, um...” 

A grin flashes quickly across his lips. “I'll bring everything we need.” He presses his fingers into her desk again before he says, “I do have one other condition, though: it can't be here.” 

She frowns. “I don't think anywhere else in the offices would be appropriate. _Here_ isn't even appropriate.” 

“I mean not at the offices at all.”

 _Oh._ “We can't do it at my place,” she says quickly, before he can even think of suggesting it. 

“What about mine?”

“I thought the Lannisters all lived in some high-rise compound together?” 

“I meant my place away from my place.” He grins nonchalantly, like having two apartments in your early twenties is just a thing people do. 

“No,” she says. The idea of being in the place he calls home is an intimacy that chokes her. She can barely stop thinking about him as it is. “Pick a hotel,” she suggests. “But not close to either of us.”

“Should we go to Maidenpool?”

That feels too much like a vacation. “No, just find somewhere in King's Landing.”

“Fine,” he sighs. “I'll pay for it.”

“I'll pay for it,” she insists and his jaw clenches. He's chafing under all of her restrictions and she doesn't know what his limit is but they have to be near it.

“We'll split it,” he counters and she nods. “One night?”

“Yes. After work on Friday. And no one has to stay after, if they don't want.” 

Jaime's mouth hardens into a bitter line. “Gods forbid.” 

“Those are my conditions,” Brienne says firmly. 

“Very romantic negotiation.” 

“It's not supposed to be romantic.” 

He looks away, but he's not as good at hiding his hurt as he is everything else, and she doesn't know why that weakness makes her feel so tenderly towards him, but she reaches out and touches his wrist with soft fingers. 

“The negotiation,” she explains. “I'm not trying to use you. You're not just the nearest warm body.” 

Telling him that truth feels like cracking open an iceberg, but she hates seeing that look on his face and she can afford to shed another layer to wipe it away. It's worth it when he smiles, lopsided and relieved. Her heart feels too big for her chest. 

“I'll text you the address once I book it,” he says. “Whenever you're free on Friday, I'll be there.”

* * *

The week passes too quickly. 

It's not that Brienne regrets agreeing to this – the thought of it fills her dreams every night that week – it's that it feels like a terrible risk, and she is not a woman who takes many risks. Not with her heart. Not anymore. 

Moving to neutral ground may be safe or it may only imbalance this further towards Jaime, shifting the center of gravity so there is no choice but for her to fall. She hopes that if she's aware of the possibility going in, she's got a chance of keeping her feet. She will have to restrain herself appropriately, and she will have to leave immediately after, but she can do it. She's been through worse than leaving a willing, handsome man in a hotel room. 

Jaime is buoyant on Friday, an electric ball of energy that compels attention everywhere he goes. She sees the covetous way others in the office look at him, the jealous sneers when they look at her. It's not hard to know what they all think. Poor Jaime, stuck with such a dour, ugly woman for a boss; poor Brienne, outshone so easily by the golden son who's her EA. She wants to shout that they've had their mouths on each other's bodies, that tonight she would be inside him where no one else has been, but she holds it behind her tight smiles and focuses on her work. 

At four, Jaime taps on her door and she can't breathe for a moment when she looks at his face. He is all hope and expectation and light and he is burning her down and they haven't even started yet. Though when she thinks about the way he saunters up to her in the break-room sometimes, about the just-shy-of-flirty messages he occasionally sends her on company chat, she wonders if they ever really stop. 

“Have a good weekend,” he says. 

Brienne swallows, nods. “I plan to.” 

His smile turns wicked and she wants to kiss it off of him. _Later_ , she promises herself, conflicted over how relieved she is that there will be a later. “I'll send you the info,” he says, waving his phone, and then he's gone and a few seconds later, before he could have even made it to the exit, her phone dings. 

It's an address for a decent chain hotel, a room number, and three words: _I'll be waiting_.

Brienne holds out until four-fifteen before she follows him. 

When she knocks on the hotel room door, her hand is shaking, her heart is running wild in her chest. She doesn't have time to worry if she should have changed her clothes, before he opens the door and he's Jaime again – his shirt is unbuttoned halfway, his sleeves are loosely rolled up, his pants are wrinkled. He drags his hand through his messy hair as he takes her in. 

“You left early,” he notes. 

“Later than you.” She looks down the hallway, and it's empty both ways but she feels eyes on her. “Can I come in?” 

Jaime steps aside and she intends to walk by him without touching him at all, but he grabs her wrist as the door swings shut, and pulls her against him. “No kiss hello?” he murmurs, snaking his arms around her waist. She curls her fingers in the open fabric of his shirt and kisses him on the cheek. 

“Hello,” she says against the faint stubble along his jaw. “Did you have a good day at work?” She means it as a joke, but somehow the teasing abandons her, leaving behind only domesticity in its wake and she cringes into his shoulder where he can't see. 

“My boss is a real ball-buster,” he whispers into her ear and a laugh escapes her, too. She's been here a minute and she's already teetering. 

Brienne pushes off of his firm chest and hurries into the room. There's a duffel bag on the armchair and a king-sized bed with the sheets turned down invitingly. She wipes her palms dry on her thighs. 

“You seem nervous,” Jaime says from behind her, and she stiffens as he gets closer, his heat creeping over her though his body doesn't touch her at all. 

“I'm not.”

He brushes past her to the duffel bag. “I'm the one who should be nervous. If my father found out I asked one of his executives to fuck me in the ass, I'd be disowned.” Jaime grins over his shoulder at her, but it's not as believable as the rocky undercurrent in his voice. 

“You don't have to do this,” Brienne says, though she's thought of little else since Monday. 

“I don't,” he agrees, pulling a harness out of the duffel bag, “but I want to.” He sets it on the nightstand, as well as an unopened bottle of lube, and a pale flesh-colored dildo. Jaime looks up at her once everything is settled. “You're not just the nearest warm body, either,” he says, and some string so tightly wound inside her she assumes it's always been there snaps free. 

Perversely, Brienne backs a step away, her arms gripping each other. Jaime's frozen, like he's stumbled on a terrified deer. 

“What did I say?” he asks, and his tone is gentle but he's so frustrated she can taste it. 

“Nothing.” 

“Then why do you look like I'm a monster?” 

Brienne's chest is heaving against her arms and she focuses on breathing, staring somewhere around Jaime's knees. “It's nothing.” 

“You don't have to do this either.”

“I know,” she whispers. 

“You really don't,” he insists, and he when he steps towards her she steps away again. “I'm not going to report you. I'm not going to get you fired. I'm not Tywin Lannister's son here. I'm just Jaime.” 

“I know.” 

“Then why are you so far from me?” It's more plea than question.

“Because you get too close.” The problem has never been that he is Tywin's son; it's always been that he could be Renly. Jaime's chin lifts and they stare at each other across the small room and Brienne knows there is nothing he can say that will make him safe for her. Then he does something she doesn't expect: he sits down on the bed with his back to her, rests his elbows on his knees, and waits. 

After a full minute, she feels her shoulders relaxing. “What are you doing?”

“Giving you space. You know where the door is, if you want to leave. You know where the bed is if you want to stay.” 

As simply as that he has laid the choice entirely at her feet. There's no pushing, no yearning need, just patience and quiet. Brienne shifts nearer. 

“Take off your shirt,” she says and he complies without a sound, just the whisper of his fingers on fabric. The bedside lamp glints on his golden skin when he pulls the shirt from his shoulders. His back is a sculpture, but there is blood pumping beneath the honeyed marble. 

Brienne pulls her suit jacket and shirt off, too, and then comes around to stand between his legs. He tilts his head back to look up at her and there's too much in his eyes so she closes her own and bends down to kiss him. 

She can feel his restraint as he kisses her back, the brush of his tongue on her lips offering suggestions and no demands. Brienne breaks the kiss and steps away, undoing her pants. “Take yours off, too,” she tells him. He stands and she's reminded that they're almost of a height, that they're definitely matched in strength. His quiet unnerves her. 

When they're both naked, Brienne picks up the harness and hefts it in one hand. It's black, the straps falling down her forearm in a caress. “Lie down on your back,” she tells him, and he hesitates for only a moment before he does, moving to the middle of the bed and tucking his arms under his head. It's a pose that comes naturally to his long, muscled frame, that suits the insubordinate smile he normally wears. It does not suit him today, not when all the ease has melted away, leaving only the sharp edges not yet worn down. 

She pulls the harness on, figuring it out fairly quickly, the straps sliding between the lips of her cunt with a persistent pressure. When she slides the dildo into the o-ring, Jaime whimpers from the bed, his mouth open as he takes her in. 

She wants him to make that sound again; she likes his noise better than his silence.

Brienne nudges his legs open and kneels between them and he is rigid all over – arms, legs, his cock curling up towards his stomach. She wraps her fingers around it and squeezes a little and he inhales hard. When she slides her hand up and down his length, his exhale is a hurricane. 

“You don't have to be quiet tonight,” she tells him. 

“I thought you liked my silence.” 

“I like your obedience,” she corrects him lightly, and it's the first real smile he's given her since she arrived. 

Brienne crawls up his body, presses down so her cock is firm against his, and he moans into her neck. “I won't hurt you,” she promises. 

“Too late,” he whispers before he wraps his arms around her and devours her mouth. 

His lips and his hands are restless all over her until she's rolling her pelvis against his, pressing the straps of the harness against her clit, and a wave builds inside her. Jaime slides his hands down to her ass and grips her hard enough to bruise. She's not quiet either when he spreads her legs so they drape on either side of his, and he slides his hand around and pushes his finger deep inside her wet cunt just as the first wave drags her under. 

When she surfaces, Jaime lets her go and she pushes herself up so she's hovering over him, panting and ready for more. His face is open and eager and when he lifts up a little to kiss her she meets him halfway, her eyes fluttering closed at how soft his lips are when he's so hard everywhere else. 

It's Jaime who breaks the kiss first, and when she opens her eyes again she's struck by the simple pleasure in his. She imagines kissing his eyelids, whispering against the shell of his ear; how he would tremble with her tenderness. 

“My turn,” she says instead, needing to back away from the compelling pull. She slinks back down to settle between his legs. “Hand me the lube.” 

With a healthy amount of lube and careful patience, Brienne gets one finger inside him and he's crying out just from that, his hips lifting up for more. She crooks her finger against his grasping walls and he trembles this way, too, deep from his spine. She rubs her palm soothingly over his jumping stomach muscles. 

“Okay?” she asks. 

She can see his throat move when he swallows. “It's great.” 

“Do you want more?” 

“Please,” he begs. She feels his voice in her chest. Brienne applies more lube and gently works Jaime open as he writhes under her careful ministrations. He's got one leg bent, his heel digging into the mattress. His cock is red and stiff, but she doesn't touch it again. Not yet. “More,” he demands when she's two fingers in. He's sweating and so is she, her clit throbbing against the straps of her harness. She gets three fingers into him, lube all over her hands, his balls, most of his ass. His body is holding her fingers so tightly inside she can barely move them, but when she does the sound he makes is unearthly. Brienne chances a look up at him and has to look away again. The _need_ on his face is too deep to be met, but he looks like he trusts that she can, that she will. He is asking for everything with every inch of his body, and she wants to give it to him but she's afraid. 

“ _More_ ,” he pleads, both legs bent and pushing his ass up off the bed. The arrogance is gone, with her fingers in him and his cock leaking steadily onto his abdomen. 

Brienne slides her fingers out and he gasps and curls inward, then expands outward, seeking her. “Just a second,” she murmurs. She lubes up the dildo until it's dripping onto the sheets and she steadies his hips with her hands, fitting her thumbs into the v of his pelvis. They fit perfectly, like her thumbs had been carved from his body. When she presses her cock against his hole he shudders and arches up towards her and she slips it in on his strangled cry. 

“Yes, fuck,” he hisses. “ _Please_.” 

There's no artifice to Jaime now, shaking and sweating under her hands, her cock slowly moving inside him. He is stretched out and vulnerable before her and once their bodies are pressed together, when she can feel his heat surging against her own, he opens his eyes and looks right at her. His keen yearning carves the center out of her chest. There's no stopping this, she realizes, even if she wanted, and she doesn't know what she wants beyond Jaime pliant and desperate against her. In this moment, she has that and – for now – it's enough. 

“Brienne,” he whispers, and she looks away, down to where she's pressed into him. She slides back out and thrusts in again as he moans loudly. “More,” he asks of her again. Jaime always wants more from her – her lips, her name, her affection. 

She gives it to him, driving in and out with focus, watching as his neck pulls into a taut arch. She admires him, golden and starving, his hands fisted in the sheets. 

Brienne wraps one hand around his cock and he shouts a curse but she keeps moving inside him, sliding her hand with slippery ease along his length and it takes no time at all before he constricts around her and then explodes on a long, agonized-sounding groan that shakes him so hard she feels it in her feet pressed against his knees. 

They're both trembling when he finally stops moving except for his deep, heaving breaths. Brienne's gulping down air and control and she presses her sticky hands against his thighs as she pulls back out of him. He whimpers again, that same noise from the beginning. She feels tender and fiercely protective towards him as he lays there vulnerable and coming back to himself and she skims her hands along his sides, soothing him, before she catches herself and gets off the bed. He tilts his head to watch her unstrap the harness and drop it on the floor. 

For an eternity they simply stare at each other. She hovers on a knife's edge decision, before he unclenches his hands and carefully extends the nearest one towards her, palm up. When she glances at his face, there's no expectation, just hope and the soft underbelly of his heart in his eyes. She's afraid, but she's not a monster, so she crawls back to him on the bed, into the sheltering curve of his open arm and lays her head on his chest to keep from having to see the happiness on his face. 

Their breathing evens out into a matching rhythm. His heart is loud under her cheek. 

“Do you need anything?” he asks, a rumble against her ear. 

“I'm fine,” she says, rubbing her fingers along the valleys between his ribs. “Do you?” 

“A shower,” he says, laughing a little, and she laughs with him. He nuzzles his nose briefly into her hair and it almost drives her away, but he must feel the tension because he pulls his head back again. “Is your last name, Tarth, from the island?” he asks. 

The question startles her so much she cranes her head back to look up at him. He's smiling, something calm and knowing, but there's none of his smugness to it. He's earned this answer at least. 

“Yes. My ancestors used to own it or run it or something. It wasn't great growing up on an island that bore my name, though.” She rests her head back on his chest, feels his fingers drawing circles on her hip. 

“I believe the island had it first,” he says and she pinches him lightly. She feels his chuckle with her palm on his belly. “I was born in Casterly Rock. We moved to King's Landing after my mother died.” He says it simply, a fact stripped of emotion, but she can hear his heart pound a little harder against her ear. 

“How old were you?” 

“Seven when she died. Eight when we moved. We had to wait for my brother to be older and healthy enough to make the trip.” 

Brienne squints at the wall, trying to recall what she knows of the Lannisters. “Which one's your brother?”

“Tyrion,” he says. “The short one, if you ask most of us. The handsome one, if you ask him.” 

His voice is rich with fondness and Brienne smiles against his chest. “I'll have to meet him.” 

“He would love that,” Jaime says, but she doesn't miss the way his arm tightens briefly around her. “What about you? Siblings? Parents?”

“I had both,” she says, and his hand stills, cups warm against her back. 

“Had?”

“Yes,” she says, and doesn't say more. Jaime kisses the top of her head and though the losses are a decade old and more, she wants to cry. “You have a sister, don't you?” she asks, desperate to steer a new course. 

“A twin sister. She's...intense.” 

Brienne tries to imagine someone more intense than Jaime, and fails entirely. “I'll take your word for it.” 

“Do that. She doesn't make good first impressions. Or second or third ones, frankly.” 

“Is there anyone else in Jaime Lannister's life?” Brienne asks, relieved that she sounds much bubblier than she feels. 

“You,” he says, and the hand she'd been running along his leg stills. “Sex and mentorship, it's a pretty good deal for me, at least” he adds, mildly. She's grateful for it. 

“One of us should go,” she finally says into his skin and he rubs his hand over her hair. 

“I'll do it.” He starts to move but she presses her palm down and holds him there. 

“Not yet,” she whispers. She feels his nod, feels the steady rise and fall of his chest, feels his absence when she wakes a few hours later and he's gone.


	9. (Interlude II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The weekend passes in a blur. 
> 
> Brienne stares at her phone far more than it deserves, but no messages come in and there are no calls to ignore. For two days, it's her and her silent phone and the ghost of Jaime's warm body stretched out against hers, and then it's Monday again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My effusive thanks to Kirazi and BrynnMcK, who each looked at MULTIPLE versions of this chapter as well as talked extensively with me about this and the next chapter up until the last minute before I posted it because this thing has made me lose my gd mind. Anything that works here is thanks to them; anything left you dislike or doesn't make sense is _definitely_ my fault. The next chapter will be up tomorrow unless things spiral out of my control but RIGHT NOW I don't anticipate that happening since it's about 75% done already.

The weekend passes in a blur. 

Brienne stares at her phone far more than it deserves, but no messages come in and there are no calls to ignore. For two days, it's her and her silent phone and the ghost of Jaime's warm body stretched out against hers, and then it's Monday again. 

She gets in at just after six am and hers is the only car in the parking lot at that hour. In her office, she remembers Jaime sitting on the hotel bed, waiting for her to decide what to do. When she turns on her floor lamp, she sees him arching off the mattress, his chest laid bare. For a moment she imagines she feels his pulse in her palms, but it's just her own heart beating his name wildly. 

At seven-fifteen, she escapes from her office just as two of her managers are walking by Jaime's still empty desk. 

“-with Brienne?” one asks the other just as she steps out, and the two women startle and shoot each other darting looks. 

All Brienne can think is that they must know. They must know about what she's done with Jaime, they must see it on her face. She's heard other women talking about how any woman who sleeps with him would be lucky, but no one would think that when that woman is her. Brienne fumbles for a random stickynote pad on his desk and hurries back to her office. She tells herself she doesn't care but she feels their judgmental stares in the muscles of her neck. 

At seven-thirty she hears Jaime greeting someone down the hall and she tenses behind her desk where she's been staring at the blank screen of her laptop for fifteen minutes. He'll be in her office soon, and though she's been here over an hour she's not ready. 

She'd asked him to leave and he'd left, but only after she'd slept curled against his chest. It had felt right, there in the cocoon of the hotel room, but here in the world it is terrifying to even look at straight on. Even though she knew better, Brienne had been sucked into the vortex of Jaime's offered vulnerability and now she's back on land and the sea looks more dangerous than ever. It will drag her in and either wreck her on the rocks or drown her in its depths. She grew up on an island (she told him that, why did she tell him that?), she knows what the ocean is like. 

Then he's hovering in the doorway and he smiles at her in an entirely new way. She has a map for charting her way in the world, one that she drew with the scars on her heart, and this smile doesn't fit those careful lines. She’s not sure how, or where, or if she can make space for it. 

He hesitates at the threshold, the bright, welcoming smile dimming at her lack of enthusiastic response. 

“Good morning,” he says quietly, serious now. 

She nods at him, unable to find enough saliva to make more than a humming welcome. 

“You got home okay.”

She nods again. 

He glances around, takes a couple steps closer. “Are you mad that I left?”

“No,” she says quickly. “I asked you to.” 

“You did.” 

“I'm not mad.” 

“Good.” He sets her coffee down, a little hard so she hears the cardboard hit the wood. “Then what's going on?”

_We had amazing sex and you left like I asked and now there's an after_ , is what she wants to tell him, which is exactly what's happening and not sufficient at all. There is expectation in every twitch of his jaw. 

“Tired, I guess,” she says. She reaches to take her coffee and he leans in enough she can smell him – the same cologne he had on Friday, subtle and earthy – and she can feel him – the heat and energy that crackles out like a solar flare – and he's too close, _he's too close_. Brienne mumbles a thank you and retreats back in her chair. Jaime just nods and leaves her again. 

He comes back at eight, the door staying open behind him. “Time for our morning sync,” he says, and she nods and they're all business, even while she hears the echo of him pleading _more_ in every small silence. Before he leaves to get on with their work, he brushes his fingertips across the top of her hand, a caress she feels all day.

Jaime doesn't ask her about what happened in the hotel or what happens next, but the question hovers in the space between their desks. She avoids him at every turn all week, and he looks a little more wary each morning, a little more weary each afternoon. So much of the distance she has kept is for herself, but she keeps it for him, too, because he's young and sheltered and doesn't deserve her burdens on those golden shoulders. 

Brienne wishes he were only the Jaime she'd known that first month, all arrogance and posturing, when what had been between them was a game and she hadn't wanted any more. She scrambles to shore up her defenses but it's hard to find the pieces she needs when Jaime's intense focus, the considering weight of his stare, push in and in and in no matter how much she tries to step back and take a breath that doesn't taste like him. 

Friday evening he comes into her office and looks expectantly at her. 

“End of the day,” he says. “Do you want anything else from me, boss?”

She wants to go back to the hotel and this time let him put his cock in her. She wants to drag him down to the lobby and suck him off while the entire office watches in jealous amazement. She wants to invite him to her home and fall asleep with him on her old sheets without touching him at all.

She shakes her head. “Have a good weekend,” she says, looking somewhere around his right shoulder. 

He sighs. “You, too.”

* * *

The weekend is endless. There are still no messages and no calls. She wonders if he's out with his beautiful friends, or if he's alone in his second apartment, or if he's even real at all. In the dark of night it sometimes feels like he's been created out of her deepest desires, an idealistic fantasy to test her resolve to not be hurt again. 

_He's not Renly,_ her traitorous heart whispers. 

He's not. He's worse. He is more of everything Renly was: handsome and funny and tender. 

She could love Jaime so much more than she ever did Renly, and he could hurt her more than Renly ever dreamed, and that she cannot survive. 

But she's not ready to be without him either. She'll have to choose between what she knows is true and what she's sure is not, but not yet. Not yet.

* * *

Too responsible to fake being sick, too anxious to face him alone, Brienne shows up for work on Monday close to eight am when the office is already filling up. Jaime is there of course, and when she arrives he stands, watching her, always watching her. His eyes have covered her body a thousand times since the first day, anticipating her, and the more she lets him in, the more he understands. Soon he'll crawl straight inside and see the mess there. Her face may not have turned him off, but the battered ugliness of her heart certainly will. 

She nods at him as she walks by, grabs her coffee from his desk, and heads into her office without a word. He comes in for their morning sync and he's tense, she can see it in the veins standing out like ley lines on his hands. 

“Are we going to talk about this?” he asks when he sits down on the edge of his chair. He looks ready to bolt. 

“I can't,” she says. 

Jaime exhales once, hard, and she waits for him to go, but he settles back with an unhappy frown. “What's on the schedule?” he asks and they move on. 

They exist this way – Jaime with his stretched-thin patience, her with her too-loud fears – until Wednesday afternoon. 

They're in the middle of a report and she's just asked his opinion on the way she's presenting their numbers on a slide. It's due to Tywin's EA in the morning for a presentation tomorrow afternoon. “You're not beautiful,” Jaime says matter-of-factly out of nowhere, like he's starting a list of all of her qualities. 

Brienne spares him a quick look and he's got his hands steepled. He's still watching her, piercing eyes always seeing too much.

“I know,” she says. She does. She's old enough to have gone from knowing and caring, to believing briefly that she wasn't, to knowing and not caring. She appreciates that he acknowledges it, even if it hurts a little that someone who's willing to have sex with her still feels that way. 

“You don't let it stop you.”

“Why should I? It's your problem, not mine.” 

“I didn't say I had a problem with it,” he says, frowning. “I should think that was clear by now.” 

Brienne glances at the open door of her office. “You will,” she tells him, her voice quiet. This is the line she must hold for them both, not yielding to the temptation to let either of them believe it can ever be anything more. 

His frown has morphed into a tight-jawed glare. “You know me so well, then?”

“Yes,” she says, suddenly tired. Because she does. He's not Renly, but he's close enough. “You're young and rich and beautiful. No one knows people like you better than people like me.”

“People like you.”

“Look at me. If I wasn't going to be a target all my life, I had to learn how you think so you'd leave me alone. Fortunately, people like you don't have to spend time being clever so it's easy to figure you out.” 

“Do you even like me?”

He's taut and radiating with fury, a live wire sitting barely controlled in the chair. Somewhere in all their blunt sparring with the truth she's wounded him. She'd had a similar conversation with Renly once and he'd just laughed and said she was right. Then he'd fucked her after and she'd believed he thought her beautiful anyway, the ugly duckling becoming her true swan self. She had believed they could have a happy ever after. What a joke it all had been. 

“I like you more than I can afford to,” she whispers, and Jaime leaps to his feet and stalks out the door without a word. There's the slide and then slam of a desk drawer and when she comes out a few minutes later, he's gone.

* * *

That night she's still working on the report at home when there's a knock on the door. Brienne blinks, startled, and looks at the time. It's past eight and she's already gotten her dinner delivered. Whoever it is knocks again, louder. She grabs her umbrella from the coatrack by the door and holds it loosely in her hand like a weapon, just in case. When she looks through the peephole it's danger, but not the violent kind. 

She pulls open the door. “What are you doing here?”

“Did you finish the report?” Jaime asks. He glances down at the umbrella in her hand but doesn't comment on it, just loosely raises an eyebrow. He's still tense, but not angry. He seems nervous. 

“What are you doing at my apartment?” she says, re-phrasing the question to try to make him standing on her doorstep make sense. 

“Being a good assistant,” he says and though he's obviously trying to be light about this it feels like a dagger swathed in cotton. “Did you finish the damn report or not?”

“No, I'm working on it now.”

He starts to push past her and she brings the umbrella up automatically as a barrier. Jaime halts and shoots her a frustrated look. “Do you want my help?”

She does, she knows that immediately. Before his storm out that afternoon they'd been making good progress; since he left she's been struggling to get her thoughts out at all, constantly wishing he was there to be her sounding board. But he can't come into her home. 

“Let me change and we can go to my building's meeting room. There aren't any gatherings scheduled for tonight. Wait here.” She shuts the door on him without waiting for an answer, and then locks it in case he decides he's not going to be patient. She cannot let him in. 

When she emerges a couple minutes later with her things packed in her briefcase, he's leaning against the far wall, his arms crossed over his chest. “Hiding a dead body in there or something?” he sneers and she ignores him and leads him to the communal room on the first floor. 

It's a huge open space with windows that look out on the quiet street. The slatted blinds are down but opened, so light stripes the space yellow and black. Brienne turns the overhead lights on but leaves them dimmed. She doesn't want to see Jaime too clearly. 

Brienne scans the area – there's a pool table, a small bar with chairs, two overstuffed couches, and a couple of small round tables. She picks one of the latter and sits in the moderately uncomfortable chair. Jaime sits across from, instead of next to, her. 

She waits for him to say something and for once he's quiet. Brienne lets the silence sit between them while she gets her things set up: her laptop, a pad of paper full of hastily scribbled notes, two pens. 

“I only got a couple of slides further,” she admits, and frankly those probably need re-doing now that he's here to help her make them better. 

“Then let's get to work,” he says, grabbing one of the pens to twirl between his fingers. 

The work, as always, is smooth, like the sex. Jaime is her match in both, not afraid to challenge her, but always willing to listen. They settle into a familiar cadence and the time passes quickly, draining the tension with it. 

It comes swirling back once she saves the final version of the presentation and mails it off to Tywin's EA. 

“I guess that's it,” she says as they both stand. “Thanks for your help.” 

“Just because you're not beautiful doesn't mean I'm not attracted to you,” Jaime says abruptly. They're soft words, but he wields them like a sword, swinging them fast and hard towards her. 

She throws up the only shield she knows. “You're attracted to what I do to you.” 

“You think that's what happened in the hotel room?”

“I don't want to talk about the hotel room,” she says between clenched teeth. 

“Someone really fucked you over, didn't they?” he says, caustic as acid. She doesn't respond, just shuts her laptop and starts gathering her things. “Some pretty boy,” this pretty boy carries on relentlessly, a slow-drip torture of truth. “Someone you loved who treated you like shit and you assumed it was because of you and not because _he was an asshole_.”

She shoves her laptop back into her bag and wishes he would just leave. But her silence is louder than any response and he seems to know he's got the truth of it in his teeth now. 

“How long did you cry over him, Brienne?” She jerks her head up and he's a bright exclamation point against the night. “Weeks? Months? Strong, impenetrable Brienne Tarth, betrayed by her own fucking heart and now she can't even see what's right in front of her.” 

“Shut up,” she says but she's not even sure he can hear her soft words; she can barely hear them herself. 

He doesn't shut up. If there is one thing she has learned about Jaime, it's that in the end he never does. “Is that why you won't let me fuck you? I know you want me to. I know you think about my cock in you as you're bent over your desk. Sitting in your chair. Home in your bed. You won't let me take care of you. You won't even let me be _nice_ to you. Because you're too afraid.” It's like he's realizing it even as he says it, his own words illuminating all of her carefully laid bricks so he can take them down one at a time. 

“Shut up,” she says again, louder this time. 

“No. It's my turn to talk. You're afraid that if you believe that I want more from you that you'll be that woman again, crying over a man who isn't worth it.” 

“Fuck you,” she spits.

“Fuck you, Brienne. Because I _am_ worth it and you're too cowardly to admit it.” 

She clutches her bag to her chest, a barrier that can't protect her. “You're a spoiled child who doesn't know the first thing about life. Tell me, Jaime, who is it you're spiting when I'm making you come: your dead mother or your distant father?”

He inhales sharply and she knows she's gone too far but she can't reel it back. 

“I'll put in my transfer in the morning,” he says and then he's gone.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When her heart is involved she can never see what's right in front of her. Jaime hadn't been wrong about that. 
> 
> He hadn't been wrong about any of what he'd said that night. The reality of that is salt in the self-inflicted wound of his sudden, cavernous absence in her life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extreme thanks again (always) to Kirazi and (for this chapter especially) BrynnMcK, who continue to be my safety net. Thank you both so much. <3 (And thank you all for all of the comments, I am deeply grateful and a little overwhelmed, heh.)

It had been Brienne who'd proposed to Renly. 

He had initiated everything else: introduction at university, first date to a movie they both liked, first kiss – on the cheek – three dates later, first kiss on the mouth two dates after that. Renly had been her first sexual experience, and he'd been patient with her nervousness and her fear that he would be another Hyle, who had tried to be her first for the sake of a bet that he could. 

But on the worst night of her life, she'd taken Renly to dinner at his favorite expensive steakhouse, and then gotten down on one knee there in the middle of everyone because she knew he'd love being the center of attention. Brienne had smiled hopefully past the crawling nerves in her stomach and held out a ring she'd spent entirely too much money on having made; she'd felt embarrassed even ordering it, especially when the jeweler assumed it was sized for her hands. 

She will never forget the expectant silence from nearby tables or the look on Renly's face as it had all sunk in: shock, which she'd expected, swiftly replaced with a dawning, horrified pity, which she had not. 

“Brienne,” Renly had said, “surely you know this isn't that serious. We're just having fun.” 

The worst part, even worse than the gasps and hurried whispers of their unwilling audience, had been the patient, disappointed way he'd said _surely_. _Surely_ she hadn't been naive enough to think Renly Baratheon – handsome and funny and the life of every party – would chain himself down with the weight of her. 

But she _had_ believed it. She'd believed that he saw her ugly face and thought it beautiful because he loved her. That when they fucked he was enjoying _her_ ; that when they laughed together it was because they shared a heart. If he sometimes said something careless that landed cruelly, if he sometimes seemed less interested in sex than she was, if he never wanted to just hold hands when they were out, those were quirks, she'd thought, and with everything else he gave her she had been happy to live with them. She had her quirks, too, and he never complained about those. He never cheated, he always answered her calls, they had drawers set aside in each other's apartments. She devoted herself to making him happy and he rewarded her for it with kindness. Brienne had watched enough romantic movies to know that the way they never argued, the way they returned to each other time and again, that meant they would be good together forever. 

The old Brienne had believed that idealistic nonsense, at least. Brienne now – junior executive Brienne who demands what she wants and never expects anything but blunt honesty in return – knows the movies are all fantasies. Handsome, charming men don't fall in love with her. Even plain, rude men don't fall in love with her. A brief string of disastrous experiences right after Renly had run out her door further proved that protecting herself while she takes what she wants is the only safe way forward. When her heart is involved she can never see what's right in front of her. Jaime hadn't been wrong about that. 

He hadn't been wrong about any of what he'd said that night. The reality of that is salt in the self-inflicted wound of his sudden, cavernous absence in her life. 

Thursday she shows up at work earlier than ever. She's awake already anyway and she wants to get in before he does, but he doesn't come in at all and his empty chair is louder than any words he might have said. On Friday, a boy even younger than Jaime knocks on her door and introduces himself as her new assistant, Podrick. 

“What happened to Jaime?” she asks, and the boy – young man, she supposes, but he looks so startled and doe-eyed it makes his youth more pronounced – stammers and shakes his head. 

“My manager didn't say, just that I was to be your EA now. Is that a mistake?”

 _Yes_ , she thinks, but it's not his. Brienne ushers him in and has him sit in Jaime's chair and gets through the entire introductory conversation without her voice breaking once. 

Her weekend is like any other: she goes to the gym, cleans her apartment, does her laundry, prepares for the week ahead. But every moment is swathed in fog and it feels like her heart has stopped beating in her chest. 

She replays her conversation with Jaime a hundred times, regrets it more with each repetition. She tries to re-do the whole thing in her mind – what if she let him into her home? what if she said 'yes, someone fucked me over and I was too naive to avoid it'? what if she told him that some lonely part of her wishes she could have just settled for what Renly would give? – but it always ends the same. 

Whether that's because it always would have or she lacks the courage to see any other way, she doesn't know. 

Perversely, it's a relief to walk in Monday morning and see Podrick's sweet face beaming expectantly at her, even though she misses Jaime's sharp-edged smiles and electric energy. There is something soothing about the boy's innocent eagerness, like a salve over an angry wound. 

There are no messages from Jaime, but she doesn't send one to him, either. His name is still in the company address book, though, so wherever he's gone, at least he hasn't left Lion Corp. It's bad enough she's fucked up her own life; she doesn't want to ruin his, too. 

Even without any sign of him at all, what he'd said that night is still loud and honest in her ears, and if she accepts the truth of that, then she has to accept that the heart he's thrown at her feet is real, too, and trying to take that in is like swallowing the sun. Because if it is true, then she's cut down the best man she's ever wanted when he was so close to being hers. That in her wild shooting at ghosts, Jaime had been caught in the crossfire. 

_It cannot be true_ , she repeats to herself with as much conviction as she can gather, along with _he was never mine_ , when she sees him for the first time since their fight, a week later at the company holiday party. 

The party is being held in Lion Corp's downstairs conference rooms, all of them opened to make a space still not big enough for everyone attending. There's expensive food and an open bar and black tie and evening wear, and it's enough to make everyone forget they're at work. 

Brienne arrives early with the other executives at Tywin's request, and she is aware the second Jaime walks in the door a little while later. She's in the middle of listening to Kevan talking about more manufacturing numbers when familiar movement catches her eye. As though he's called her name, Brienne finds Jaime immediately in the throng. His tuxedo looks like it was sewed on him, his hair has been trimmed and styled; when he moves his hand to take an offered glass of red wine, she sees the glimmer of diamond cufflinks. He is so beautiful it makes her heart thump loudly, makes her fingers itch to draw him near. 

_He is not mine_ she reminds herself, and smoothes down the front of her dress; it's long, soft, deep twilight blue silk, with a high slit in the front and a low dip in the back to highlight what she knows are the best parts of her too-big body. The waves of magnetic energy roll off of him and she can feel their ripple and tug even across the room. Four steps in and he's surrounded by well-wishers and sycophants. Everyone knows this will be his company next, no matter what he's doing now, and power and charm are a heady cocktail for anyone. She wonders if anyone else can see the annoyed line of his smile. 

Avoiding him in the crowd is easy; forgetting he is here is impossible. Brienne is certain she talks to a hundred people that night, but she forgets each one of them as soon as she steps away. 

Late into the evening, Jaime has his jacket off and his bowtie undone and every time she looks his way – every five minutes it feels like, maybe more – he's looking insolently back at her. He knows how attractive he is in his white shirt unbuttoned at the throat and women have been throwing themselves at him nonstop, even the married ones as they got progressively more drunk. Brienne knows he hasn't been drinking beyond that first glass; she's been watching him from across the room as much as he's been watching her. He's still upset and so is she, but they don't stop staring at each other all night. 

Every time he smiles at one of the women pawing at his chest, she feels like an addict going through the first stage of withdrawal, taken to a bar and forced to watch everyone but her drink deep. She knows what his skin tastes like, and she wonders if any of these women do, too, when he lets them trail their painted nails down his arm. The unhappiness hiding in his eyes doesn't make her heart hurt any less. 

The executives are expected to be around until the end of the party, but Brienne can't breathe in the crowded space and she can't avoid the pressure of Jaime's gaze, so she pushes her way inelegantly through the throng and heads for the only safe place she knows. The upper floors are dark, but she's walked them enough that she heads unerringly to her office, past Pod's desk with its array of superhero figures. She leaves the lights off inside but opens the blinds to let the moonlight in. It's a clear and cold night, and the moon is half-full and beautiful. 

Brienne collapses into her chair and shuts her eyes, feeling weaker and heavier and more exhausted than she's ever been. 

In the quiet she hears the soft ding of the elevator arriving and she knows it's Jaime before he's even standing shadowed in her doorway, his silhouette all hard angles and tense lines. She's sure he's come for a fight and she doesn't blame him, but she's too tired to give him one. She doesn't even have the strength to try to hide when he steps into the room, searching her face. 

Brienne waits for the well-deserved lash of his tongue, hopes it will flay away the last soft parts of her heart so she can be done with them. Instead, Jaime shuts the door behind him and comes around the desk to kneel at her feet. He doesn't touch her, just rests his hands on his thighs and holds her gaze. There is a new tightness around his eyes that she wants to smooth away, even though she knows she's the one who put it there. He will never let her, but that has never stopped her from wanting. Desire has always been her curse. 

She pictures him in the hotel room, holding his open palm out to her, his heart in his eyes. Brienne hasn't wanted to think about the hotel room, because the hotel room is proof that Jaime is right and she's the same, scared fool she's always been, except now she's dangerous to others, too. 

It is very quiet in her office, although the faint chatter of the crowds below whispers out from the vents. From a distance, everyone sounds happy. 

“You look as miserable as I am,” Jaime finally says, and there's no pleasure in his tone. 

“You didn't look miserable surrounded by all those beautiful women.” Her response is automatic, the ugly animal scratch of her heart leaping to defend her out of a lifetime of habit, and she winces a little. 

His lips tighten into a thin line. “You're not the only one who has to protect themselves, Brienne.” 

She stares down at his strong hands, golden and tapping nervously against his legs. “I know.”

“Why don't you believe what's between us?” he asks her softly. 

Brienne licks her lips. After all this, he's earned her truth. “I'm afraid to. How do I know that it's real?”

“I don't know how to prove to you that it is." His fingers rub small valleys into his pants. "You have to trust what you feel. What you felt in the hotel room. You have to trust _me_. Whatever ghost you're seeing when you look my way...there's only me.”

It's so easy for him, she thinks, to give out his heart. Who would turn him away? 

_Me_ , she realizes, inhaling at the sharp bite of it. Over and over. 

“You said I hurt you,” she whispers, and when she glances up at him, he's watching her steadily. “At the hotel. I said that I wouldn't and you said it was too late. If that's true, why do you still want more? Why did you follow me up here after all that I said?”

He still doesn't touch her, but he leans nearer, a hairsbreadth, but she sees it. “You – what we could be – are worth the pain,” he says simply. 

“I'm sorry,” she tells him and her voice falls apart with the density of all that those two words contain. She's so fucking sorry: for what she said, for what she did, for not being brave until this moment when it's already too late. 

Without a word he slips his arms around her waist and holds her close. She grips him hard, clinging to him like a life preserver, and he pulls her tighter still; tears fall hot down her cheeks like he's squeezing them out of her. It has been so many years since anyone has held her because _she_ needs it and not because they do.

“I don't know how to navigate you,” Jaime admits quietly. She's resting her cheek against the top of his head, but he doesn't seem to care that her tears are matting his hair. “I push too hard and you push me away. I give you too much space and you think I don't want you.” 

“I don't know how, either. I'm no good at this.” 

“Then we can learn together. But you've got to trust me, Brienne. Just a little and we can build from there.” 

“You can't carry my weight,” she whispers. “I can barely carry it myself.” 

“Hey.” Jaime leans back a little, extricates himself and wipes the tears from her face with gentle thumbs. “I'm strong enough,” he insists. 

She wants to believe him. He's more courageous by far, and maybe the burden of her fears will be less if they share it. Maybe they will disappear altogether under Jaime's careful hands. She hesitates nonetheless. “I can't saddle you with my problems.” 

“You're not forcing me into this. This entire time, it's all been my choice, too.” 

“Why?” she asks, her voice breaking even on that one simple word. 

He shrugs, looking a little helpless. “Because every time I enter a room, I hope that you're there.”

She is at a precipice here, something tall and terrifying, and the safest thing to do would be to back down and walk away. Brienne has spent a lifetime taking the safe path down, and she knows it means retreating to loneliness without even trying to fight for something more. She never wants to feel again the way she felt in those days and weeks and months after Renly, but Renly had never made her feel like herself, and Jaime always does. Even now, here, kneeling at her feet, the moonlight reveals his open face. He's pleading for a chance and it's impossible in this moment to deny the sincerity in everything he says. Whether he couches it in arrogance or tenderness, he has made it easy to trust him: he tells her the truth, he does what she asks, he bares his throat first so they both will be bleeding if this all goes wrong. What he demanded before, he's asking gently for now, but either way it's only ever been for more of who she is, not who she could never be. 

He is not Renly at all, he is Jaime, and he's holding out his hand and asking for just one step forward on her own. Just one, and she knows he will walk the rest at her side. He's been doing it since she met him. 

Brienne exhales, soft and scared, and kisses him to match it. Whatever her fears want to convince her of, they are not as loud as Jaime's lips against hers. 

She breathes him in, and offers a first, terrifying step. “I want you to fuck me,” she tells him and it comes out more firmly than she could have hoped, like her body already knows what her heart is just waking up to. “But not here. I want you to come home with me.” 

Jaime's fingers are tight on her waist. He stares at her for a long minute, either to convince himself to believe her or make sure she doesn't change her mind. She sees the moment he accepts it as real – the whole of his face shifts, goes soft and sure in turns as he surges up to kiss her with a desperate hunger he has kept leashed before. His lips are hot and searching, his tongue is fierce against hers as he stands, still kissing her while he pulls her up with him. 

He wraps his arms around her like iron and kicks her chair so it rattles away and crashes into the wall. “I can drive us,” he pants and she nods against him and they pull apart but Jaime catches her hand before she can fully retreat. “Come on,” he says, tugging her after him. He leads her out the back of the building, avoiding the party entirely. 

Jaime doesn't let go until he has to, to back out of his parking space, and then he takes her hand again from where she's resting it against her leg. He rubs his thumb over the top and shoots her watchful, feverish stares. She knows he's afraid she'll change her mind, but he's trusting her again and it shames her how easily he manages that when she wouldn't even let him use her name. 

“I'm sorry,” she says again, for all the things she keeps remembering, and he kisses her fingers. 

“You already said that,” he tells her with a smile. 

They don't say anything else on the drive, or on the elevator ride where Jaime taps his foot against the floor like it will make everything go faster, or at her door where she fumbles her keys with him hovering a breath behind her. 

She lets him in and awkwardly says, “See, no dead bodies,” before he's crushing her against his chest to kiss her hard, and her nervousness and worry and fear disappear beneath the onslaught. 

He peels himself away long enough to ask, “Bedroom?” 

Brienne, dazed, points to the closed door on the opposite wall and then they stumble that direction, while she works at his buttons and he unzips the side of her dress. One of them opens the door, or maybe they do it together, Jaime turning the knob and Brienne shoving it with her foot and she feels a candy cane twist of primal delight and nervous embarrassment to have Jaime here in her bedroom, with her photos and clothes and old sheets, and her.

“I want a full tour later,” he informs her, before he lays her down across the bed and straddles her thighs. He runs his hand up her leg under the slit in her dress while he tugs at the thin straps at her top. “I thought you must have worn this just to drive me mad,” he says, leaning forward to kiss her collarbone and the small swell of her breast barely visible near the neckline of her dress. Under the skirt, his hand has arrived at the junction of her legs. He presses his palm against her underwear and she rolls into it. 

“Did it work?” she gasps. In answer he tugs aside her underwear and slides two fingers deep in her wet cunt and she cries out in pleasure. 

“You could have been in pajamas and it would've worked,” he breathes against her chest, crooking his fingers up so she moans low with pleasure. Jaime pulls his fingers out of her but she doesn't complain because he yanks the top of her dress down enough to expose her breasts. She's not wearing a bra and she's grateful for how quickly that lets him get to her. 

It's unexpected, what he does when she's not directing him. Instead of persistent focus, he licks a long stripe in the wide plane between her breasts, before sucking one nipple and then the other into his mouth, back and forth in short, tingling bursts, like he can't decide which he wants so he takes it all. His mouth and tongue draw her up so the only part of her back touching the bed is her shoulders. Jaime cups his hands under her ass and he pulls her up enough to press his cock hard against her center. Brienne moans and tightens her legs around him, greedy for more. 

She wants to feel his body, to fill her palms with his warm skin over firm muscles, and she struggles with the rest of his buttons as he rocks his pelvis against hers. She looks up to snap at him to stop for a second so she can focus, but his eyes are so bright with joy she bites her lip and makes do with most of his shirt undone, sliding her hands along his chest, scratching her nails in the curling hair. 

Jaime tugs her dress up and over her hips, her panties down her thighs, and stares with such burning intent at her cunt it's a wonder she doesn't come just from his eyes on her. That gaze travels up her body, over the freckled skin of her chest, the straining muscles of her neck, to her face, and she waits for the fire to dim, but it only grows hotter. 

“Brienne,” he murmurs, sliding one hand up the same path, until he's got his hand curled around the back of her neck and he's pulling her up to meet him. He kisses her so sweetly, nipping gently at her lower lip, his tongue darting tentatively out, that it's a miracle she doesn't cry. 

“Pants,” she says when he pulls away, and he nods, their hands tangling at his belt. They work together to shove his clothes down almost to his knees and she draws her finger over the leaking slit of his cock, and then licks the taste of him off of it while he watches with an almost pained look on his face. 

“Fuck,” he breathes, “I can't wait any more.” He yanks her underwear all the way off one leg and presses her thighs wide with his firm, strong palms. Jaime slides his cock along the slick lips of her cunt and she shudders at the rightness of it, the heat and solid weight. “I know we talked, but I have condoms,” he says rough and strained, “if you want--”

“No,” she says, a short, desperate puff. “I want this, you, like this.” 

“I won't hurt you,” he promises her and she wants to believe him more than she ever wanted to flee, so she trusts him and nods and he presses his forehead to hers as he slides slowly inside. Brienne is eager for him, tilting her hips up, curling her legs around his body to pull him deeper, faster. Some part of her has wanted this since she walked into her office that first day and he was there, smug and knowing and ready to serve. His cock fills her, her cunt clenching and holding him near. When he's all the way in, they sigh into each other, and she feels his breath rush through her at every point they touch. Brienne cries out softly when Jaime slides out before slowly pushing back into her wet center. His body is trembling with the pace, and the lamplight caressing the side of his face illuminates the furrowed line of his brow, the tight muscles of his jaw. She strokes them gently. 

“You don't have to go slow,” she whispers, breathless and aching. 

“I want this to last.” 

Brienne traces her fingers over his temple, across his cheekbone, down to his lips wet and red with her lipstick. “It will,” she assures him. 

He trusts her, as he has trusted her from the first, and kisses her once, twice, a third time, before he pulls his cock out and then thrusts in with enough force she throws her arm above her head and presses her hand against the wall. He is ravenous then and she's begging to be devoured, his teeth and chin scraping over her own, down her neck, his hands busy at her breasts and kneading her ass. Brienne's cries are high-pitched and desperate and she's got one hand curled in his hair, the other grasping helplessly at his back. She lets him take what he wants, wants to give him whatever he needs, and even as he's driving into her she understands the power in being the one who surrenders. 

Jaime curls over her, his hips pistoning hard as she cants her hips up and offers all of herself. “I want you,” he pants into her ear. “Do you believe me now?”

“Yes,” she keens. “Yes, yes.” After all she's denied them both, it's the only word she has left and she gives it freely. He tilts his hips up in a way that has his cock sliding along her clit with every thrust and soon even her yeses abandon her and she's crying out, a long, loud wail that pours out of her and it might be his name and it might be nonsense but it's still _yes_ and _I trust you_ and _I'm yours_. Jaime comes even as her orgasm still rolls in shockwaves through her body, and she feels the hot pulse of him inside of her while he shudders and moans above. 

He collapses on top of her and she holds him there, his sweaty chest against her own, the last rhythmic jerks of his cock inside her. 

They take great heaving breaths in time and Jaime slides out and off of her, kicks his shoes and his pants all the way off, finally gets those last damnable buttons of his shirt and then he's naked in her bed under her thin cotton sheets. Brienne struggles with her dress until he chuckles and says, “Let me help,” and then they're naked together except for Jaime in his socks. She toes at them and he grins, but there's something uncertain to it. 

“My feet get cold when I sleep. I thought I'd protect you.” 

The meaning of what he's assuming beats at the edges of her scarred heart, and for a moment she fears there is no way in, that there's no room left for even Jaime's softness; until the softness gently smoothes an old wound over to make a new space and she exhales, shaky, but sure. “I'll give you the tour in the morning,” she says, and his arms go so tight around her she thinks she couldn't escape if she tried, and for once, she doesn't want to. 

“I'm sorry, too,” he whispers into her hair, and Brienne frowns up at the ceiling, thinks one of them should get up and turn off the light but she doesn't want to move. 

“What are you sorry about?”

“That I pushed too hard.” 

“You were right.” He starts to say more, but she kisses him quiet. _I should've started kissing him long ago_ , she thinks with a slow-growing delight. 

Her eyes are getting heavy, his arm is heavy over her chest, his leg is heavy curled around hers. It's a weight she can easily bear. 

“Brienne,” he says softly. And again: “Brienne.” 

“Mm?”

Jaime combs his fingers tenderly through her hair. “I just like saying your name.” 

In the morning she will tell him he can call her whatever he wants, though they'll have to have rules at work. In the morning, they'll talk about what happens next. In the morning, she'll wake up and Jaime will still be here and she will still be herself but this time she'll be clear-eyed and able to see. 

Tonight, there are no ghosts in her room; there's only her and Jaime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter! We're in the happy part now! Yay!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaime's naked and bent over her desk, and she's already got two fingers in him, when he looks back over his shoulder and says, just as unbearably smug as the first day Brienne met him, “What's taking you so long?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thanks to kirazi for reviewing this chapter for emotional closure and also coming up with some of my favorite parts. You've been a gem through all of this and I appreciate you. <3 All other awkwardness and mistakes are mine alone!
> 
> Pegging in this chapter, FYI. The summary probably made that clear but just in case.

Jaime's naked and bent over her desk, and she's already got two fingers in him, when he looks back over his shoulder and says, just as unbearably smug as the first day Brienne met him, “What's taking you so long?”

They're breaking in her new desk in her new office after her first month in her new role as Vice President of her division at Lion Corp. The path to get here has been unexpected, the journey and destination both to be mostly cherished. A few dips, too, but there have been far more peaks.

The golden hills of Jaime's shoulders bunched and yearning before her are definitely two of them.

* * *

The morning after the holiday party, Brienne had woken up first, Jaime's arm still circled around her waist, his head tucked into her shoulder. Her first thought upon waking had been: _he's very warm._

As far as morning-after thoughts went, that had been in her top ten most pleasant up until that point.

Then he'd gotten too warm and she'd slipped out from under him, went to the bathroom and considered everything that had happened. She’d prodded the new soft spaces in her heart, tender and unsure. When she’d come back out, he’d been lying there looking at her. Jaime, on her sheets, as gorgeous and giving and troublesome as ever. She'd felt her heartbeat in her throat. 

“Good morning,” he'd said, tentative and so unsure she felt a fresh wave of guilt.

“Good morning.” Brienne had gone to grab two pairs of shorts and two shirts and threw one set at him. “Get dressed and I'll give you the tour before breakfast.”

Jaime's smile had been enough to light her whole apartment.

They'd stayed in that whole weekend, mostly just talking. Brienne had told him about Renly, Jaime had told her about his father's expectations for him that he didn't want. Tentatively, circling slowly around and around the discussion until it could no longer be avoided, they'd both admitted they wanted to make this a relationship, exclusive and more than just whenever the sexual fancy struck. That had been the scariest part of the weekend, but it had helped to have Jaime gently leading the way.

(“You're a decade younger than me,” she said at one point.

“I'm very mature for my age,” he'd assured her.

She'd laughed. “No you're not.”

“No, but you like it.”

She did; he made her feel like she was younger and less broken, too.)

They'd had sex one more time before he'd left Sunday night, Brienne riding on top of him with long, languorous rolls of her hips, while Jaime softly told her all the things he admired about her, bringing them both to slow, soul-deep climaxes.

She had kissed him goodbye without asking about work the next day, and had been surprised when she showed up and Podrick was still at his desk.

“Good morning, Ms. Tarth! Did you enjoy the party on Friday?”

“I did, Podrick, thank you.” He'd kept looking at her expectantly. “Did you?”

“It was wonderful. My first one with Lion Corp.”

“Well I'm sure you'll enjoy a long career here and attend many more,” she'd said and then, just before she disappeared into her office added, “you can call me Brienne.”

Jaime had sauntered into her office at noon dressed in jeans and a button down shirt and tilted his head at her. “Free for lunch?”

She'd made time, joining him at a nearby cafe, both of them being careful not to touch each other, though under the table she'd pressed the side of her knee into his just to see his eyes light up.

“Have they finally found something for you at Lion Corp?” she'd asked. He'd said he'd spent most of the past week in his apartment sulking, though they both knew it had been deeper than that.

“They've made me Kevan's idea man, so I expect you to pay better attention to his presentations from now on.”

She'd blushed furiously.

“Listen,” he'd continued, so careful to stir his coffee, so careful to set his hand down near hers on the table without brushing it. “We didn't talk about how to be at work.”

“We didn't.”

“I imagine you're reluctant to announce you're sleeping with the boss's son.”

She'd glanced around but his voice had been low and the cafe had been loud. “I am,” she'd admitted. “I'm not ashamed, but you have to see how it would look.”

“I do. I understand.” Then, so, so carefully, he'd pressed the tips of his fingers against hers. “We can keep it between us. But I won't stop by to see you during the day, unless I have a reason to.”

He'd found a surprising number of reasons to in the month that followed.

* * *

Brienne slides a third finger in and he trembles as she gently stretches him open. The lube is dripping onto the carpet, and so is the liquid from his leaking cock, but they're good at cleaning now.

“That's it,” he grunts, pushing back against her hand, asking for more as he always does. Jaime's needs seem almost infinite sometimes, but she's discovered she likes the challenge of meeting them, likes the way they open up new veins in herself.

She slides her fingers in and out, presses them deep and he makes a low, eager cry that goes straight to her cunt. His back is shining with sweat; they've been at this for awhile and some time ago he'd come inside her when she straddled him in her fancy new chair. She still feels his semen drying on her thighs.

“Why are you going so slow?” he asks, arrogant even though she's got a shirt and thigh-high stockings and a harness on and he has nothing.

“You're very pushy today,” she says fondly.

“You love it,” he smirks. He knows she does, and that she loves him because of it.

(That conversation had gone so horrifyingly bad she still cringes when she thinks about it, although Jaime laughs louder and more freely each time it gets brought up, which is always by him.

“Do you remember when you first told me you loved me and then you threw up in my lap?” he teases her sometimes, though he hadn't laughed when it had happened.

“No,” she usually says. Or sometimes: “My love is conditional on you never mentioning that again.” Or occasionally, when it's late at night and they're lying in bed in the dark: “My heart was too full of my feelings for you.”)

“Are you in a hurry?” she asks him here in her dimly lit office, rubbing her fingers along the bumps of his spine, collecting his sweat and drawing patterns on his back. He arches up into her touch like a cat, which shifts her fingers inside him and the resulting noise he makes is pure pleasure.

“I've just really been looking forward to you fucking me, Ms. Vice President.”

She lightly smacks his ass and he likes that, too. “I told you to stop calling me that.”

“But it's so sexy.”

“It makes me feel like a politician.” When he laughs he clenches around her fingers and she wiggles them until he moans.

“Please,” he begs, the insolence draining out of him. “Please, Brienne.”

He mostly only calls her Brienne now, though he's got a hundred different ways to say her name, each one another claw in her heart binding them together. The damage he would do if he ever yanked free would be incalculable, but she mostly doesn't think of that anymore. When she does, Jaime seems to have a sixth sense about it, and those are the times he takes over, giving her what she needs before she even knows how to ask for it.

He is a remarkable man, and she tries hard to show him that in these moments when he lays all his trust in her hands.

“Since you asked so nicely,” she says, pulling her fingers out. His ass tries to follow but she presses a palm against the firm muscle and holds him still. “You can't change your mind now,” she says, and his shoulders jump with his small laugh.

Brienne leans down to kiss from his tailbone to the base of his neck, feels him shiver with each gentle press of her lips. He reaches his hand back and grips her thigh, squeezing it in gratitude. Jaime is multilingual in love languages, but she hears him best when he touches her.

She puts more lube on the dildo and then presses slow and gentle into him, leaning all the way over his body until they are joined in one big, sweat-soaked curve. Brienne has never so enjoyed being herself until these moments when her size makes it easier to reach all of Jaime at once. She feels his heartbeat through her chest and is unsurprised to find they match.

* * *

There had been a few days, from that weekend after the holiday party to now, where Brienne had been afraid it would all fall apart, but none more-so than the random Tuesday a couple months back, when he'd walked into her office, pale and shell-shocked, and sat down in his chair.

“Jaime,” she'd said, startled. When Podrick had appeared at the door, frowning, she'd motioned him to leave them be, and he'd shut the door between them. She and Jaime hadn't been alone in her closed office since the night of the holiday party. “What's wrong?”

“My father, uh. He died.”

“Oh, gods, Jaime. I'm so sorry.” She'd reached out her hand towards him across the desk but he'd just stared blankly at it.

“They want me to be the CEO now, to show the company's future is in good hands.” Brienne had stood up then, gone around to kneel down at his side and wrap him in her arms. They'd sat like that for several minutes, Jaime not crying, only breathing shallowly and just a little too fast. Brienne hadn't known what to tell him and decided words hadn't helped her when her father died, either, so she'd said nothing. “I don't want it,” he'd finally said.

She hadn't asked why; they'd talked about it before. “You'd be good at it.”

“What about us?” When she'd looked up, he was staring right at her.

“We'll make it work,” she'd said, though it looked grimmer now than it had before he'd walked in. Hiding a relationship with the boss' son was one thing; hiding a relationship with the boss was another. _Having_ a relationship with the boss was, given how things had begun between them, the least of her concerns.

“I need some time to think,” he'd said, and she'd held him for awhile longer before he'd left and disappeared for awhile. He'd texted her a few times during those weeks, reassuring her he wanted to be with her but the seven-day funeral vigil combined with the CEO prep was too intense. He'd tell her how much he missed her, and he'd promised over and over he'd see her soon.

Two and a half weeks later he'd walked into her office again, shutting the door himself this time. He'd looked exhausted, a burdened and dimmed version of his usual shining star. He'd grown a beard; she suspected to make him look older. It had worked and she'd forgotten he was twenty-four.

For a long time he'd just stared at her, drinking her in with his hungry gaze.

“I missed you,” she'd said first and he'd exhaled loud and deep. 

“I missed you, too,” he'd said, taking his seat.

“Did you know all this was coming?” she'd asked.

“No. At least, not so soon. He'd been sick for awhile, but we didn't know how sick.”

They'd talked until the sky went dark outside, and it had been a relief to them both how easy it all was, that what had changed between them was in name only. Jaime had finally leaned back in his chair and said, “This feels weird. Now that I'm in charge, this feels wrong when it didn't before.”

“I was never really in charge of you,” she'd said ruefully.

“Yes, you were. I would have done anything you asked, Brienne.” He'd stood slowly. “Now I feel like I shouldn't be fraternizing with one of the senior executives while I'm CEO.”

She'd tried to smile but everything had hurt a little too much, like her skin had been steamed off and every speck of dust was a pinprick. “Lucky for us, then, that I'm a junior exec,” she'd said, aiming for lightness, not a net to hold him down.

He'd lifted an eyebrow and smiled mysteriously, gesturing at her laptop. When Brienne had opened it again, there was an email congratulating her on her promotion to Vice President of her division.

“Jaime,” she'd whispered, and he'd held up a finger to stop any protest.

“You've earned it through hard work. I'm shifting people around with my father's death and this spot opened up when Kevan got moved somewhere he'll actually be useful. You were a unanimous choice to take his place.” He'd tapped her desk. “Congratulations.”

“And us?” she'd asked. She'd been so afraid of his answer, but he'd pressed his hand flat on her desk as he leaned in, grabbing her chin gently with his other hand to force her to look at him.

“Give me a little more time,” he'd said. “I will make this work.”

It was either trust him or give him up, so she'd trusted him.

“Jaime,” she'd said as he'd turned to go. “All this,” she'd gestured from his tired eyes down to his expensive shoes, “it doesn't suit you.”

He'd laughed, genuinely delighted. “That's the nicest thing you could have said to me. Wait for me a little longer,” he'd pleaded. She'd nodded and he'd walked out her door.

Friday night a few days later, he'd knocked on her apartment door.

“What are you doing here?” she'd asked, letting him in.

“I quit,” he’d said, then winced. “I was going to lead into that, sorry.”

It had been good to see him in her home again, the familiar way he threw himself down on her couch. The way his energy filled and warmed every dark corner.

“Why did you quit?” she'd asked him.

“It didn't suit me,” he'd said, grinning. He'd shaved and he looked younger and lighter, like the beard had weighed a hundred pounds, not a few ounces.

“What about the company?”

“My aunt is taking over. She was thrilled when I asked her. Do you have any water? I haven't been able to eat or drink anything all day and now that I've put in my resignation I'm ravenous.”

She'd gotten him water, made him a quick sandwich. He'd devoured both before sitting up and pulling her onto his lap. “I quit for myself,” he'd said. “But I quit for you, too.”

“Jaime--”

“The only worthwhile thing that happened to me at Lion Corp was meeting you. I don't need to be there anymore. I don't want to be CEO. I want to be your boyfriend that you make those annoyed little faces at.” She'd made one then and he'd kissed her soundly.

“I can't believe you gave up being CEO of a multi-million dollar business.”

“It's not as great as it sounds. And don't worry, I have plans for myself and I made a transition plan for the company, too. Lion Corp will be fine.”

“How do you know that's what I was worrying about?”

“I can read you like a book, Brienne.” He'd grinned, raking his eyes up and down her body. “And tonight you are definitely an erotic romance.”

* * *

Now a month later, she smiles into his shoulder in her new office and rubs her hands over his hips. He presses his ass against her and takes all of her in and it shifts the small attachment pressed against her clit enough to make her gasp. The harness is new, too, one they'd enjoyed shopping for together. 

“This is so good for me,” Jaime had told her after their last time doing this, his lips against her jaw, “we can make it better for you, too.” 

Brienne had been skeptical – fucking Jaime was already a highlight of their sex life – but as usual, he'd been right. Just having it hanging against her while she'd fucked him with her fingers, occasionally pressing her pelvis against the back of his thigh, had gotten her so close to the edge she'd needed to pull back. 

Now as she moves in small, minute thrusts, enough for him to feel it, but not enough that they have to separate too far, everything is building inside of her. Already she doesn’t like being away from him, especially when he’s like this, all grasping, beautiful want. Brienne slides her hand around his thigh and cups his balls, finds them tight and ready.

She pushes the pace for both of them and with every long, deep thrust she feels an expanding pressure in herself that she can't control. But Jaime is quivering under her and she's learning sometimes control is the last thing she wants, so she fucks him just a little bit faster and she comes hard while he chants her name and he offers and asks for more, always more. 

She catches her breath and thrusts back into him fiercely, drawing a wordless cry from his chest, making her shudder from the aftershocks of the friction against her clit. Brienne drapes herself around him like a blanket. 

“Jaime,” she whispers and he arches his head back so she can settle her mouth near his ear. She's pounding into him, her shirt crumpling against his skin, her fingers crawling up to wrap around his cock. “I love you,” she tells him, and he comes hot and hard in her hand with a desperate, noisy shout.

He sags against her desk and she stays fused to him for a little bit longer. Neither of them wants her to move right away when they do this; they both need the contact and the comfort. It had taken some time to work out what felt right for both of them, but as with everything, they've reached a happy compromise.

“That's not playing fair,” he pants and Brienne only smiles as she pulls out of him, rubs her hand soothingly over his back, tangles her fingers in his hair until he turns his head to look at her. His eyes are bright and calm, and the smile on his lips is one she's tasted a hundred times and will taste a thousand times more if they're lucky and smart and honest. She trusts they will be.

“I'm not playing,” she says, and she kisses him like she knows she won't be hurt again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading this story! As I have mentioned, this genuinely started as a smutty one-shot with no intention of expanding into a story let alone the emotional journey that it became. But then I suppose Brienne didn't expect that either, so I guess that works. Thank you for going on that journey with me and her; your enthusiasm and occasional wailing were all very motivating to keep going. :) 
> 
> I've got plans for a couple of follow-on one-shots and this universe is a great place to meet the JB Monthly Madness prompts, and hopefully a guest author who was voluntold to write something (hee) will appear, too. I'll be making a series to post all of those under after I post this chapter. 
> 
> Thank you again, so much! I had no idea if an older Brienne/younger Jaime dynamic would even work, let alone be so warmly embraced by y'all. <3 I'm deeply grateful!


End file.
